


Messages from the Unseen World

by doctorcolubra



Category: Silicon Valley (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - 1920s, Epistolary, First Time, Intercrural Sex, M/M, Oral Sex, Period-Typical Homophobia, References to Alan Turing, Slow Burn, and about equally to Wittgenstein, attempted corporal punishment (referenced), gay Cambridge nerds, significant use of first names
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-04
Updated: 2018-04-28
Packaged: 2019-03-13 16:34:00
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 20,722
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13574508
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/doctorcolubra/pseuds/doctorcolubra
Summary: 1928.  Brilliant mathematician Richard Hendricks left Cambridge last summer, after a feud with a professor and a bad case of nerves.  Now he's back, and Jared Dunn, a lonely American researcher, can't help but be fascinated.





	1. Sights on Infinity

**Author's Note:**

> The gay Cambridge AU that no one asked for. I've mashed together details from two different biographies of famous sexy nerds, the Monk biography of Wittgenstein and the Hodges biography of Alan Turing. If anyone reading this is like, good at math, please accept my apologies and just try to hang on until the porn (ETA chapter 3). I did my best.

> My dear Gilfoyle,  
>  Well, God has arrived. I met him on the 5.15 train. He’s already announced that he’s going to be staying in Cambridge ‘permanently’. Lucky us, then? After the way he left us last summer, you would think he’d be full of apologies, and he almost managed one. Same old Hendricks as always. That brain of his is still cracked straight down the middle, unfortunately. Meanwhile we’ve had tea and now I can finally escape to my study to write to you. I can see that the fatigue is going to be crushing. But I must not let him talk to me for more than two or three hours a day.
> 
> I invited him to the supper meeting of the Apostles in London, on Bachman’s orders. We know poor old Erlich’s only trying to seem relevant when all he has these days is a connection with a boy genius who’s done…well, nothing much, really. But it ought to be fun, especially after months of everyone being calm and even productive. Dunn and Bighead are infecting everyone else with their pacific natures. You and I are the only ones who still hate each other! What a heavy responsibility.  
>  Until tomorrow, yrs., D. Chugtai

* * *

Jared Dunn just joined the Apostles in September, a transplant from Yale. An invasive species from the New World, perhaps—he doesn’t belong here, a stubborn survivor who’s got a foothold in this foreign soil. As a newcomer, Jared narrowly missed the fracas last summer between the Apostles and Richard Hendricks. It was all a mystery at first, because everyone just groaned at the sound of the man’s name. No one could summon up the energy to tell the tale…except Chugtai, waspish enough by nature to enjoy some gossip. Dr Belson had made some greasy attempt to take credit for Hendricks’ work, and might well have got away with it, had the younger man not fought back noisily. His efforts were apparently very tiresome to everyone else. Belson managed to drop the issue and save face. No consequences for a man of his stature. In high dudgeon, and suffering from some nervous illness, Hendricks had gone home to rest.

This story is a glimpse of daffodils in the snow to Jared, who has been working for Belson for months that feel like years. He writes it on an index card that he sticks to the wall above his desk at home: _somebody fought back._

Tonight, the Apostles are meeting at the Connaught Rooms in Great Queen Street, welcoming Hendricks back to the fold, but no one seems very happy about it. Except Bachman, who has come back to blustery life with the news of his old protégé’s return.

Hendricks himself is late, or at least he’s later than Jared would ever dare to be. At twenty past the hour he bursts in through the wood-panelled doors in a sweaty rush, all heads in the room turning to look. Shorter than Jared (although most people are), slight, pale, with a bony, inquisitive profile. His hair looks as though he might have tried to comb it straight with water before leaving the house, but by now it’s a mess again, curly hair that looks almost red in this light. Open collar, no tie, second-hand tweed jacket that must date back to Victoria’s reign, frayed at the cuffs and collar. His eyes are large, of some clear colour that catches the light, and he is afraid.

It’s that fear that catches Jared. Chugtai said Hendricks was obstinate, rigid, obsessive, aloof, and intermittently explosive. Maybe that’s true, but all Jared can see right now is a stammering, uneasy man with bitten nails who cannot hide his terror.

‘Is he nervous to be back here with you, do you think?’ Jared asks Bighead. 

‘Oh, that’s just Richard,’ Bighead says easily, tilting his glass to stir some ice around. Teetotaler, always spends evenings nursing tall tumblers of tonic water. ‘He’s always nervous. But probably more so tonight, after everything that happened last summer. Good job you missed that.’

‘Should we—would it be more comfortable if I left?’

‘No, I don’t think anything makes him comfortable. Why would _you_ leave, anyway?’

‘Just to set him at ease, if he’s awkward with strangers. It’s not very hospitable to have the guest of honour looking like that, is it?’ Jared draws breath to ask _is he still ill_ , but doesn’t. None of his business. ‘Miserable, I mean.’

Bighead shrugs. ‘I think it looks worse than it is. He’ll be fine, let me introduce you.’

So Bighead leads Jared over and makes the introductions.

‘This is—it’s Jared, isn’t it?—Jared Dunn. I’m not sure what he’s working on now, he’s an economist,’ Bighead is saying, benignly out of the loop as usual. ‘New to the Apostles since September, so you’ve not met. Dunn, this is Richard Hendricks. I’ll let you two get on with it, I think we’re still a few minutes away from getting a glimpse of the food.’

Jared offers his hand and Hendricks shakes it, after surreptitiously wiping his sweaty palm on his trousers. Close up, it’s evident that he hasn’t shaved in a few days, his stubble light-coloured enough to pass from across the room. ‘It’s wonderful to meet you after hearing so much about your work,’ Jared says. ‘I hear you’re back in Cambridge for good?’

‘That’s the plan,’ says Hendricks. His tone is abstracted, his gaze flicking around the room, as if trying to look anywhere else but at Jared. And yet he’s smiling, lips pressed thin, diffident. ‘Who knows, really. Last time I thought I’d be here for good too, so—it doesn’t matter. You’re from the States? Canada? Whereabouts?’

‘I’m actually not sure!’ Jared says, smiling as he often does when people ask about his background. No reason not to put the best face he can on it. ‘California’s the earliest place I remember, but it seems my father’s been living in Arkansas, or maybe Missouri, so I might have been born there. The orphanage lost my documentation so it’s all rather a mystery. I could be Anastasia Romanov for all I know.’ Seeing that this information is having the usual effect, Jared tries to dial it down. ‘But before Cambridge I was at Yale. And you? They tell me you’ve been home for awhile, where’s home?’

‘Um. St Leonards-on-Sea, it’s…it’s just west of Hastings. In Sussex. Quite dull. You know how the seaside is in winter. Or you probably don’t, I’m sure it’s much more exciting in California. But yes, things were—things are going very well now, no problems at all. Good to be back.’ This is less than convincing, as Hendricks is staring at a spot just to the left of Jared’s shoulder and picking unconsciously at a torn cuticle. ‘Really very happy and good, lots of exciting work to…to work on.’

Jared’s unpredictable childhood has made him better than most Cambridge men at reading between the lines, so he says, ‘I didn’t mean to pry, please excuse me. Would you tell me about what you’re working on? Only if you’d like to. It’s not my field, but everyone speaks so highly of it...’

Something about that response makes Hendricks relax his shoulders a bit. ‘Well—the others might have exaggerated, it’s not very interesting if you don’t do maths or logic. I mean it is interesting, because I think it could really…’ He seems about to trail off into silence, opening and closing one hand a few times as if he could pluck words out of the air. But then he picks up the end of the sentence again. ‘It’s important, though I don’t…know quite how to explain why. But I don’t know, I’m not sure of anything yet. Anyway. Have you read much of David Hilbert? The _Entscheidungsproblem_?’

‘No, but I’ve heard of Hilbert.’

This is, evidently, all the encouragement Hendricks needs. ‘Right, so the _Entscheidungsproblem_ is a challenge that Hilbert posed. Find an algorithm that will take any statement you can make in first-order logic—you know, _Socrates is a man_ and all that—and you plug in your axioms and this algorithm can tell you then if the statement is universally valid or not.’ Hendricks pauses, then seems to decide that this isn’t a very lucid explanation. ‘Universally valid means—well, the algorithm can tell you if a statement can be proven at all, according to the rules of mathematical logic.’

Jared has done some logic but gets in over his head quickly when someone like Gilfoyle starts to bring in more abstract math. He isn’t quite sure that he’s on the trolley, but he likes to see Hendricks light up. ‘All right. I’m not sure that I’m clear on your definition of an algorithm, though…?’

‘No, but that’s an important point,’ says Hendricks, more animated now. ‘That’s one of the main problems, trying to clean up our concept of what an algorithm really is. But for now, think of it like…like a chess game. The axioms are your pieces, and they can be anywhere on the board. The allowable steps of a proof are like the available legal moves. So the algorithm would be a process of analysis that determines whether a piece can move or not. We do this automatically as we play, we look at the board and think “can I move the knight there, can I castle or is it too late?” Some form of computation is going on in our heads when we do that, do you see? So could we translate that computation into the language of mathematics? Into an algorithm that would define the process?’

Jared doesn’t immediately see the applications of this, but he’s still letting the idea take shape in his head. ‘So you’re trying to codify a sort of human intuition about whether a problem is worth trying to prove, one way or the other. Is that right?’

‘Sort of. No, not necessarily, but sometimes. Plenty of problems are…look here, imagine a map of England. It’s possible to use only four colours to shade in each county, such that no two adjacent counties have the same colour. Sounds about right, doesn’t it? It’s not even a matter of intuition. We can really do it! A child can do it with four crayons. But no one’s been able to prove mathematically that it would _always_ work. And they’ve tried! It’s a well-known problem in topology, no proofs, just an assertion. Is it provable or not, we don’t know. What if we could take all the relevant pieces of information and analyse them with a process that will tell us if the problem is solvable?’ 

Jared pauses for a few moments to digest this. ‘Is a thing like that really possible?’

‘That’s the question. Hilbert thinks it is.’

‘Because…it seems rather tidy, doesn’t it? I’m not a logician, but I’ve seen Chugtai and Gilfoyle arguing, and it seems as though logic struggles to parse real questions. They find themselves tied in knots all the time. After thousands of years they’re not any further ahead on things like the Cretan Liar’s Paradox. Unless I’m misunderstanding you,’ says Jared, not wanting to embarrass himself. Or to offend Hendricks. ‘But…even with an algorithm, wouldn’t it take ages to work out every permutation of a problem like the one you mentioned, with the map of England? Assuming that nobody makes a mechanical error in the middle. ’

Hendricks now has a peculiar disconnected expression, his gaze no longer flickering restlessly around but fixed, blank. He doesn’t answer, and it’s not even clear if he’s listening.

‘I mean, even a very rational system can be vulnerable,’ Jared says, not sure if he’s boring the other man to tears. Perhaps he’s missed the point so badly that it’s not even worth laughing. ‘Like a government office, maybe, or a telephone switchboard—’

‘I need to go,’ Hendricks says abruptly, and he does. 

Without another word, he walks straight out the door, ignoring the protests from Bachman, who’s been holding court at the high table.

Bertram Gilfoyle, who brought a book to the dinner and hasn’t been conversing much with the others, looks up at Jared. ‘How were _you_ the one to set him off?’ he asks. ‘I didn’t even get the chance.’

‘I should go after him to apologise,’ says Jared, although he doesn’t know what he might have said wrong.

Chugtai shakes his head. ‘Don’t bother. Hendricks is brilliant, but…’

‘I know,’ Jared says with a sigh. They’re right, of course; it’s probably nothing personal.

* * *

It’s some twelve hours later that Richard realises that he treated Dunn very rudely. He’s taken the train from King’s Cross straight back to Cambridge and he’s been working all night long, covering his desk with papers. The sun is up, the clock on the mantel striking eight, and from his window he can now see undergrads heading to chapel. Downstairs, the landlady is padding around the kitchen, the kettle clinking as she sets it on the hob, the smell of burnt toast distinguishable at a few parts per million.

Which is frustrating, because all Richard wants is to work steadily until he has an answer, a plan, a structure, a frame. Something. Instead he has to deal with all the stupid little interruptions from the phenomenal world. Eat something. Sleep. Eat something else. Bathe. Shave. Get dressed. Talk to someone who can’t wait. Write letters. Write lectures. Sleep again. Impossible to think like this. Impossible to do anything else, when the idea is pulsing inside him like a dying star. If he doesn’t get it out of him and onto paper then he might forget it, or he might die and never get to touch it at all. It can’t wait.

But Dunn is the one person Richard doesn’t resent at the moment—he’s been thinking of him all night, in fact. At every turn in his argument, he’s thinking of how to explain it to Dunn, or to someone like him, someone intelligent and willing to listen but lacking a technical background. There must be a way to make someone like that understand the algorithm. If it can’t be explained clearly then he shall never be quite sure that he’s really solved it, rather than merely pushing numbers and symbols around. Cleverness can be faked and substance can’t. Richard has never taken much interest in making his ideas clear to laymen before, but to be fair, laymen don’t usually take much interest in him, either. With Dunn’s gentle attention on him last night, he’d wanted to be better.

God, what a way to treat somebody like that. Just walking out without even a good-by. Back in Cambridge for three days and Richard has already fouled something up.

He shuffles around through the papers on his desk, trying to find something clean, then gives up and turns over a page of calculations to write on the back.

> Sunday  
>  Dear Dunn,  
>  Dreadfully sorry for my behaviour last night. It’s only that you gave me an idea (quite without meaning to, I think) and I simply had to get away to someplace quiet and write it down before the thing slipped out of my grasp again. But that’s no excuse, of course, because you would have understood at once if I’d told you that, or at least I think you would. _Noli turbare circulos meos_ , etc.
> 
> If you’ll forgive me, it would be good to talk to you again. At the earliest opportunity, if possible. Are you free for tea tomorrow? It’s early in the morning just now and I’m about to fall dead asleep like Count Dracula, after working all night like a perfect idiot, but by tomorrow I should be restored. Do write back, and my apologies once again.  
>  Yours, R.P. Hendricks

> Sunday evening  
>  Dear Hendricks,  
>  I confess I was taken aback last night, but as long as you aren’t cross with me then I’m not cross with you. Sometimes the Muses simply won’t wait. But thank you for writing to apologize, as it’s much appreciated. Everyone seemed to have a good enough time at dinner after you left, but it was all the same as usual. Hopefully you can stay till the end next time, because the Apostles could use a bit of divine inspiration to shake things up, as it were.
> 
> I’m happy to meet for tea tomorrow, if you like! I can come by your rooms at a quarter of four, if that’s all right. I’d invite you to my own rooms but I have an obstreperous roommate (flatmate?) who you’re better off not meeting.  
>  Yours truly, D. Dunn

* * *

After getting that letter, Richard has no choice but to frantically clean up. And unpack. Even though he only got back to Cambridge three days ago, his rooms aren’t fit for company: the air is stale, an empty teacup has tree-like rings inside it where the cold tea has evaporated, his books are still in boxes, and snowdrifts of paper cover every flat surface. An aspidistra in one corner has actually gathered dust. It’s never even occurred to him that a houseplant could do that. Anyone the least bit competent with real world activities could straighten the place up inside of an hour, but Richard takes three, periodically getting distracted by a book that he’s putting away or attempting to iron his shirts poorly before putting them in the closet. 

Normally he wouldn’t take this kind of trouble just for tea, something so informal that it doesn’t even need an invitation. Everyone he knows at Cambridge would know what to expect from him (not much). But Dunn is American, and obviously a very tidy and precise person. You could tell that just from his clothes, the creases in his trousers and his crisp collar and his necktie that hasn’t been knotted unevenly or used as a belt. (Richard, on the other hand, has been known to improvise when he’s in a hurry.) Dunn will have expectations. And after making such a disastrous first impression, Richard can at least make a half-decent second impression.

He apologises humbly to his landlady for the various ways he’s inconvenienced her already, in just three days of staying here. He’s cadging half a tin of Crawford’s biscuits when Dunn arrives, and Richard can hear the smile in the landlady’s voice from the front hall as she’s letting him in. The murmur of Dunn’s low voice, and peals of laughter in response—she sounds thirty years younger in an instant. 

And then Dunn is filling up the kitchen doorway, with that reticent yet attentive duck of his head. ‘Good day, Hendricks—I’m not too early, am I?’

‘No, no, not at all. Mrs Moffat, Mr Dunn,’ Richard says to introduce them. ‘He is a friend of Mr Bighetti and the others. From California.’

‘California, goodness,’ says Mrs Moffat, impressed. She’s looking at Dunn like he’s royalty. ‘How glamorous! You lads go on upstairs, and I’ll run you up some tea in just a moment.’

They thank her and go up to Richard’s rooms, which do look quite respectable now. Worth the effort. ‘That’s the fastest I’ve ever seen a Cambridge landlady take to someone,’ Richard says. ‘What on earth did you say to her?’

‘Nothing out of the ordinary,’ says Dunn, taking a seat by the fire, turning his chair just a bit so that his knees aren’t bumping the underside of the table. ‘But I’m lucky enough to have a number of elderly friends.’

He doesn’t explain, and Richard doesn’t think it quite right to ask. Up close, in his own rooms, Dunn is a bit intimidating. Not quite classically handsome—his eyes are a bit too close together, although they are very blue. But he’s elegant in a way that Richard could never manage. Smooth, well-made, all creamy pale skin and that thick dark hair that nonetheless obeys the comb. Long-fingered hands. _Don’t lose your train of thought, Hendricks._

‘I really was terribly rude last night,’ Richard says, sitting down with Dunn. ‘I didn’t even ask about your work.’

Dunn smiles. The line of his mouth is interesting, the corners of his lips turned down even when he’s smiling freely. ‘Economics is about as interesting to outsiders as mathematics is. Not that there isn’t some overlap. My first paper was on probability and truth-values, so I think that’s why Chugtai and Gilfoyle invited me to join the Apostles. Now I’m working on an argument about the gold standard, when I have time. Dr Belson keeps me very busy.’

Richard looks up sharply. ‘You work with Belson?’

‘I work _for_ Belson, yes. Assisting his research on the economic effects of German reparations. Obviously I’d like to have more time for my own research, but…’ Dunn shrugs. Almost imperceptibly, his jaw works a little. ‘Dr Belson’s work does have the potential to make the world a better place. Just as he always says. I know you and he have had dealings.’

Indeed. ‘I wasn’t even in his department, I’m not one of his little undergrads,’ Richard says, even while a distant voice in his head is telling him not to work himself up into a Shakespearean rage when he’s just having tea with a very kind American gentleman. Nothing is wrong. Everything is fine. ‘We were—do you know this story?’

‘Chugtai said there was a plagiarism scandal…?’

‘Ha. Not that, I mean, not half as much of a scandal as—as there should have been. I was presenting a bit of work in progress at a Mathematical Society meeting, nothing really important. About a little algorithm from Bentham that I thought was interesting. Belson was there and…and he just took it, my idea. He didn’t ask, he didn’t credit. Expecting that I’d let him do it. My family—’ Richard halts there, realising that he’s going too far and getting personal. He closes his mouth for a moment, really trying to stop and turn this conversation around, but he just can’t force himself to drop the subject. He doesn’t want to talk about home, doesn’t want Dunn to know just how bad it got, but he has to say this much. ‘When I went home, my family thought that it was all…vanity, you know? Ego. That I wanted the glory for something I’d thought of. And I couldn’t make them understand that it wasn’t like that at all.’

‘You just didn’t want Belson to treat you like you were nothing,’ Dunn surmises.

 _‘Yes.’_ The relief feels almost physical, like a hot bath. ‘I knew…thank you, yes, exactly. I thought you’d understand.’

‘I do.’ Dunn has a way of looking at you steadily without it being uncomfortable, a gift that Richard has never possessed. ‘Honestly, I’ve felt the same way in front of Belson. He never tried to take my ideas, but…well, did you know that my Christian name isn’t Jared?’

‘No. Wait, yes, you initialled your letter with a D.’

‘It’s Donald Dunn, yes. My first day with Belson, he called me Jared—I think he had me confused with another American student here, Mr Ryan, because we’re about the same height. But Ryan’s name is Jonah, not Jared, so that’s really only a guess. And Belson doesn’t like to be corrected, so I never did.’

That does sound exactly like Belson, in Richard’s experience. ‘But Bighead introduced you as Jared too.’

‘Oh, well, I don’t really mind it. A rose by any other name, right?’ Dunn smiles. ‘It’s a bit fun to use a different name. Like being a fugitive in the South Seas somewhere and knowing that now they’ll never track you down.’ Without pausing to elaborate on that idea, Dunn went on, ‘Will you tell me a bit about what you spent the night working on? I’m awfully curious now, even if I probably won’t understand any better than I did the first time.’

‘No. No, no. Opposite. You understood it better than I did,’ Richard says, getting up from the table to go to the desk. ‘That was just it, you absolutely demolished my thinking and you didn’t even know it—’

‘Goodness, I’m sorry.’

‘ _No_ , please, don’t be sorry…’ Richard’s rifling through the papers on his desk, regretting that he tried to tidy up in here at the expense of knowing where the bloody hell his things are. ‘One moment, just a moment…’

Mrs Moffat knocks in a perfunctory way and comes in with the tea tray while Richard sorts through the scurf on his desk. She does everything but give Dunn a kiss on the forehead as she leaves, ignoring Richard, but when he turns back to the table he finds a very nice spread set out for the two of them. Sandwiches, a bit of cold chicken, a plate of Cornish splits bursting with cream, an aromatic spice cake, and the tin of Crawford’s biscuits.

‘Blimey, she’s certainly sweet on you,’ Richard remarks as he sits back down with a sheaf of notes in hand. ‘You ought to come by more often. Anyway, here it is. You got me thinking when you mentioned the Cretan Liar, and then when you said _mechanical error_ it was just—like a bomb went off in my head. A good bomb. That’s a terrible simile, never mind. But you were right, Dunn, you were absolutely right. The _Entscheidungsproblem_ can’t be solved.’

‘I’m afraid you’ll have to walk me through it,’ says Dunn. ‘Talk, I’ll pour. Cream and sugar?’

‘Black. Thanks. I can’t believe I didn’t think of this before, it’s right there in Hilbert and Cantor. But you mentioned mechanical errors, like making a mistake in simple arithmetic because you’re tired. What if those operations really were mechanical? What if a machine could do them, a machine that wouldn’t get tired?’

Dunn slides a full teacup across to Richard and sets to doctoring his own. ‘A machine like…didn’t Pascal develop a machine to do arithmetic?’

‘ _Yes_ , God, yes, he used it for accounting, of course you’d know that,’ Richard says, delighted, scribbling a note to himself in one corner. ‘That’s exactly what I mean, but those machines, they were limited, you see? They could only do certain operations, and they needed a human operator to put them through their paces. With an abacus a human must move all the beads, and with the Pascaline a human must move the dials. Suppose we take the idea of the algorithm that I described for you, and we imagine it as—as a machine? A bit like a typewriter, perhaps, or a stock ticker, since it’ll use a strip of tape. An endless, infinite tape, just for our thought experiment. The tape’s divided up into squares, you see, like a schoolboy’s arithmetic book.’ Richard has sketched this out any number of times, trying to wrap his mind around it, but he draws it again for Dunn, a strip divided into squares that feeds into a featureless box. 

‘Our machine can move along the tape, either to the left or to the right,’ he explains, so deep into it that he’s not even paying attention to whether Dunn is following or not. ‘It can write or erase symbols in the squares, and it can also…it can read those symbols, somehow. Scan them and recognise what they are. I don’t know how, but that’s not important. We don’t have to build the thing, we just have to imagine it. Now, this machine will have to be…configured, somehow. Given a set of instructions. The instructions might say, “if you come to a blank square, move right” or “if you come to a square that isn’t blank, go to—” I’ve made a table, you can see…’

Dunn has moved his chair over from across the table so that he can sit next to Richard, peering over his shoulder at the notes. One page is at risk of falling into the butter, so Dunn gathers up the papers and stacks them neatly, holding them on his lap instead. ‘So the tables are just a number of if statements, like in logic,’ he says after a moment.

‘Right, yes. Any kind of table is possible, any configuration. They could be long or short, they could likely be nested—the configuration table would determine what the machine could do. Not the construction of the machine itself. All the machine needs to do is read, print, move left or right, and decide which action to take based on the configuration table.’

‘Not that this isn’t interesting,’ says Dunn, ‘but what does this have to do with Hilbert’s problem?’

Richard makes a vague, convulsive gesture with one hand, not really intending to, just out of excitement. ‘If I can explain this then I think you’ll like it very much, it’s absolutely—you know, they say maths can’t be funny but this is a scream. To me, anyway. Maybe not…at all to anyone else. I don’t know. So. We could write a configuration table for one of these machines that would follow a set of rules to tell us whether, say, a number is prime or not. You can imagine something like that, right? But we couldn’t write a table for the _Entscheidungsproblem_. Too complex. There’s a back-door to this problem, though, and that’s how I could tell that Hilbert’s wrong.’

Dunn reaches back to his place-setting to pick up his teacup, his long-fingered hands wrapped around it for warmth. ‘What’s the back door?’

‘What would happen if you tried to use one of these machines to calculate pi? As a guess.’

‘We said the tape was infinite, so I suppose it would just keep on printing the digits of pi forever.’

‘Exactly. It wouldn’t stop, but otherwise there’s no contradiction there. It would go on following its little rulebook for churning out digits of pi, and the process is perfectly well-defined. Infinite tapes don’t exist in real life, but that’s the only difficulty there. So we could say that pi is a computable number. It can be computed.’

‘All right.’

‘Suppose we take all those configuration tables we’ve been using and put them in order from the simplest to the largest. I mean we couldn’t because it’d take forever, but immortal men with infinite paper could do it. So the square root of three might be number 678 on the list, and the logarithm of pi a few hundred pages further down, and so on. I’m really on my way somewhere with this Socratic malarkey, Dunn, I promise you.’

Dunn laughs. ‘I trust you, Hendricks, go on.’

‘Well, Cantor already gave us a little present fifty years ago. He did something similar to our list of tables. Rational numbers—every possible fraction between zero and one—go in a list, expressed as infinite decimals, like this.’ Richard flips through his notes, and has to check Dunn’s stack too before he finds it. ‘Here. This is what part of it would look like. Look at the digits I’ve underlined.’

.50000000000000000…  
.33333333333333333…  
.25000000000000000…  
.66666666666666666…  
.20000000000000000…  
.16666666666666666…  
.40000000000000000…  
.75000000000000000…  
.14285714285714285…  
.60000000000000000…  
.12500000000000000…  
.28571428571428571…  
.80000000000000000…  
.11111111111111111…

Richard takes the underlined digits and writes them as a single number: .53060600200401…

‘Now, what if we were to change each digit of this number, increasing each by one? And nines to zeroes, obviously.’

.64171711311512…

‘This number,’ Richard says, tapping it with his pen, ‘cannot possibly be in the list. It differs from the first rational number in the first decimal place, and it differs from the second rational number in the second place, and so on. It can’t be in our list of rational numbers, so it must be irrational. In fact, there’s another level of strangeness underneath this, but…well, it’s not actually important, so never mind. Irrational numbers aren’t news, anyhow. Pythagoras knew about them. That’s not Cantor’s point. Cantor’s trying to show that there is no list that can contain every infinite decimal—the real numbers. Anytime you try to make a list, we could use that same diagonal trick we just used to define another infinite decimal that isn’t in the list.’

To Richard, this is the punchline, but of course it doesn’t get a laugh. He wasn’t really expecting one, so that’s all right.

Dunn is looking down at the table of numbers, his brow furrowed, fingertips moving slowly just above the surface of the paper. They’re sitting quite close now, knees bumping, and Richard can smell his shaving soap and scent. Crisp herbal lavender, starched cotton, wool, a wisp of pipe tobacco. Beneath that, elusive but present, there’s the warmth of Dunn’s body and the subtle scent of his clean skin, a trace of beeswax from a pomade in his hair.

‘So that’s infinity,’ Dunn says with a slow smile. His eyes are shining. ‘Everybody’s always on the list, but there’s always room for one more.’

‘Yes.’ Richard can feel his own heart beating harder, full of joy. ‘You were right, don’t you see? That it was all too tidy. The rational gives rise to the irrational. Computable numbers breed the uncomputable. Of course there’s no definite method for solving mathematical questions. Of course there couldn’t be. We’ve an example right here that proves it, we’re done. An uncomputable number is an unsolvable problem.’

‘But why couldn’t your machine do what you just did? Why couldn’t you tell it to use the diagonal trick of Cantor’s?’

Richard nods, picking up his pen again. ‘I thought of that too. So it would go like this…’ 

This proof is more complex and involves some actual maths, rather than just imagining machines that don’t exist and looking at tables. He has to repeat some steps a few times when Dunn has questions or misses a nuance, usually because Richard has explained it badly, but they reach the finish at last. 

‘…And any of these machines might fall into a loop and produce nothing at all, and there’s really no way of knowing whether they will or not,’ Richard is saying, and suddenly he looks up from the notes on the table. The room is in half-darkness, dusk outside the window, the and the fire has subsided into red seams along black cinders. ‘What _time_ is it?’

Dunn checks his watch. ‘Half past six.’

‘Oh. That, um, that rather took awhile, I’m sorry.’

‘Don’t even think of apologising, Hendricks,’ says Dunn, putting his watch back in his waistcoat pocket. ‘You had me in your thrall. Like Odysseus and the sirens, I could have listened all night. I don’t even know how to…really, you flatter me by pretending that this discovery had anything to do with me. It was just a coincidence that you thought of it while we were talking. I’m honoured, of course, but—’

‘No, but—’ Richard says and stops, not sure how to phrase it. ‘No. Something about the problem, you understood it at once. You did. It’s—philosophers say a “pre-philosophical intuition”, but in maths we call it naïve. Not in a bad way. Naïve mathematics is useful, it works.’

Dunn smiles, a little sadly, although sometimes the set of his eyes naturally looks sad. ‘That’s nice. I don’t always get to be naïve.’

Richard doesn’t know what to say to that, and he falls quiet. The room is getting cold as the fire dies down, a bit of gaslight from the street falling through the windowpanes to make parallelograms of pale light on the rug. Dunn is warm beside him, and for a single strange moment, Richard thinks about climbing into the other man’s lap.

But instead he should say something, anything else.

‘I can’t believe I’ve kept you this long and we haven’t even eaten,’ he says, pushing his chair back from the table and getting up abruptly to stir life back into the fire. ‘Shall I ask Mrs Moffat to send up another pot of tea? Or shall we—if you’re expected somewhere else—’

‘My dance card is empty,’ says Dunn with a smile, and he moves back to his own place at the table. ‘Another pot of tea would be good. I’m starting to like the stuff, you know. When I first got to England it tasted like dirty water, but now I find it grounding. You can get used to anything, my uncle used to say.’

They engage Mrs Moffat for another pot of tea, which this time they drink without letting it go cold. Richard sets his sandwich by the fire to warm up again, leaving it vulnerable to the boarding-house’s wandering cat Porgy, who makes off with a sardine. Feeling spent of conversation, Richard just prods Dunn into talking about America, about the gold standard, about Germany and reparations. 

He’s happy in a way he couldn’t explain. He feels safe, even though he’s in his own room and there’s no reason why he shouldn’t be. But it’s the idea that’s safe. Dunn has heard it, and the proofs are tucked away in his head now too. Even if something happens to Richard, the idea will still be alive.

When Dunn takes his leave, it’s only an hour before the curfew. He hasn’t got his gown, since he was expecting to be back in his own rooms by sunset. It’s a stupid, medieval rule, but the proctors do roam the streets and impose fines for these things, so Richard lends him cap and gown.

‘I’ll get it back from you tomorrow. Or whenever.’

‘No, tomorrow. You’ll need it back. If you come by my place at three, my roommate won’t be in.’

‘That’s fine. That’s good, I mean, yes. And you’re at—I’ve your letter already, of course, I know where you’re staying.’

‘On Albion Row.’ They’re at the door, and the borrowed gown’s a bit short on Dunn, whipping in the night wind like a flag. ‘Good, then I’ll see you tomorrow, Hendricks. Give my best to Mrs Moffat, will you? Good-night.’

‘Good-night, Dunn.’

Richard closes the door after him, and walks back upstairs to his rooms. As easy as that, he can sleep now—the idea that’s been possessing him like a demon is satisfied, released. _Dunn has the proof,_ he whispers to himself again and again, prayer-like, as he gets ready for bed. The darkness presses in when the lamp goes off, and he thinks about Dunn sitting close enough to touch. Like this. Reaches under his waistband for his cock, trying to imagine what it would be like to be beautiful enough that someone like that would want to touch you.


	2. Sweet Cam Flow Softly

All of a sudden, they’re friends. Hendricks comes by Jared’s rooms the next day to retrieve his cap and gown, and from then on it seems settled. Most days of the week, Jared escapes his roommate to take his tea with Hendricks, or else they find some other place to haunt for an hour or two. They talk about their work, of course, but also about the Apostles, the weather, what books they’re reading, and their favourite Buster Keaton films (Jared loves _Seven Chances_ ; Hendricks loves _The Boat_ ). Jared can even cautiously complain about Belson, while Hendricks eggs him on.

One afternoon, Hendricks appears on Jared’s doorstep to drop off a book he’s borrowed. The weather is wet and cold, late in January, but Hendricks is wearing a singlet and shorts with a small rucksack, dripping wet as if he’s just climbed out of the river. His curly hair looks darker, wilder than usual in the damp and falling over his forehead. He’s both flushed and pale, angular slashes of high colour in his cheeks and blossoming up his throat from his chest, while his limbs are wax-white, beaded with rain and sweat. 

Jared can’t hide his astonishment. ‘What are you—are you all _right?_ ’

‘Of course. I run all the time. It’s early in the season but I’m getting on all right.’

‘You ran here from your place?’ Hendricks lives about a mile from Jared, in a little street off Parker’s Piece.

‘I’m on my way up to Grantchester. It’s quite pretty, going along the river. You can come along, if you like. If you’re not busy.’ A grin. ‘And if you can cope with the weather.’ 

There’s a note in his voice that Jared wouldn’t have expected to hear: it’s a challenge. Almost a joke, but there’s a little gleam in Hendricks’ eyes that says he wants to see what Jared will do.

‘It’s not my sport,’ Jared says. ‘I did crew at Yale. Never really much of a runner.’ But it’s hard to say no to Hendricks, somehow, and despite the rain he relents. Besides, Jared knows first aid in case of hypothermia. ‘I could pace you on my bicycle. Do we get to stop in Grantchester for a pint or are we going all the way to Athens to announce that we’ve beat the Persians?’

It gets a laugh out of Hendricks, who turns to head back down to the street. ‘ _Nenikekamen!_ ’ he says in Greek from the gate. ‘I’ll let you have a breather in the village, Dunn, don’t worry. Get your bicycle and catch up, I’ll see you in a few minutes.’

He takes off again down the street, and as Jared watches from the doorstep, the whole thing becomes clearer. Hendricks isn’t a _good_ runner. His form is comically bad—arms held too high, fists clenched too tight, flat-footed stride, no grace or lightness. But the hard, ropy muscles of a runner are plain to see in his calves, so he really does do this often. Something solitary, something that doesn’t need a team or a partner. Something with no rules, other than to keep moving forward. 

Jared takes his bicycle out, pedalling along at an easy pace with one hand on the bars and the other managing an umbrella—he’ll only play along so far. He soon overtakes Hendricks on Grange Road and they make a choppy but surprisingly pleasant way toward Grantchester, Jared riding a bit ahead and waiting or else coasting along slowly alongside Hendricks. The rain is dreary, falling from a gunmetal grey sky on the cobbled street, but as they’re cutting past a playing field the road narrows into a quiet path along the banks of the glassy River Cam, all rolling land and hedgerows and big bosomy trees, chestnuts and willows. The trees are bare, but the grass is still green, matted and wet from the rain.

They don’t talk much on the way; Hendricks seems deep in his own thoughts, or perhaps for once he’s not thinking at all, pounding along with his awkward stride and taking no notice of the rain except to occasionally push his wet hair back from his face. It’s strange to be around him when he isn’t talking or hunched over a notebook, and Jared thinks that this is probably what it’s like to see him asleep.

In the village of Grantchester, they stop at a pub called The Green Man, a Tudor place with hand-hewn timbers. Hendricks digs out a sweatshirt from his rucksack, and against his will, Jared is thinking of a better way to pack that. With a towel and a bottle for drinking water and something like an apple to eat on the march and _stop that at once, Dunn, you’re not his mother_. 

When they’re sitting down inside, warm by the fire, they get a pot of tea and a pint for Hendricks; Jared likes the atmosphere of pubs but doesn’t drink himself, since he took the pledge when he was twelve and a promise is a promise. Jared says, ‘How long have you been running?’

‘School days,’ Hendricks says with a shrug, putting his glass down on the beer mat. ‘Wasn’t good at anything else, footer or cricket or like that. Which was all they cared about at school. In weather like this when we couldn’t have footer, they’d let us do races, and I wasn’t good at those _either_ —you’ve seen me, I’m not a sprinter. But house runs, those were longer and I could beat the others. I could stick it when they were starting to flag. It was the only time I was good at anything other than…being a brain, you know.’

Not only a challenge, then; Hendricks wanted to impress him. Jared can’t imagine why, but that’s how it looks. ‘What kind of school was it? A boarding school? I’m imagining like Lowood—’

‘Right, I did actually go to school with boys, Dunn, thanks very much.’

‘Well, I haven’t read as many books set in boys’ schools. _Jane Eyre_ was my favourite when I was a kid, I don’t know how many times I read it. I still have the same copy, a discard from the library. The covers are starting to fall off.’

Hendricks is resting his chin in his hand, the heel of his palm smothering a smile, his eyes warm. ‘No, it wasn’t like Lowood, it was just…a normal public school for boys in Dorset, all right, it wasn’t some hellhole. There weren’t any typhus outbreaks. I didn’t hate it. But it was…far away from home, and I hadn’t any brothers ahead of me, and I never really—I don’t exactly make friends easily,’ he says, chewing on a fingernail. ‘I’m sure that’s a shocker.’

‘I thought we fell in pretty quickly,’ Jared says, and it’s blunt because you only get so much time with a person before time and circumstances will try to rip you apart, and it’s best to make sure nothing’s left unsaid. ‘Aren’t we friends?’

Hendricks doesn’t like to say things so baldly, skirting around topics with daisy-chains of hesitation and half-finished sentences. The question startles him. ‘Are we—no, no, it’s not that…that I thought you weren’t—of course we’re friends, Dunn, look at what you put up with from me.’

‘There was the rain, but that’s really the only thing I’ve put up with from you so far,’ said Jared. Perhaps he’s had enough of this English dodging, because he ploughs ahead even though it’s obvious that Hendricks finds it awkward. ‘I like talking to you. It’s incredible to be at Cambridge, you know, but I don’t have any brothers ahead of me here either. You’re my confidant. You’re my Helen Burns.’

‘My God.’ Hendricks collapses into laughter, though he’s still so embarrassed that scrubs both his hands over his face, hiding for a second. ‘I’m really absolutely not, but that’s—flattering? I think I’m flattered. What made you come all the way over here, anyway?’ It’s an obvious attempt to change the topic, but he’s smiling. Pleased and doesn’t want to show it, which is good enough for Jared to let him off the hook. ‘Yale’s just as good as Cambridge.’

Jared shrugs. ‘Why pass up the opportunity? Nothing was keeping me there. I don’t have family, and New Haven wasn’t really home. California wasn’t either.’

‘What kind of…’ Hendricks begins and then stops, looking down and shaking his head. “Um. Nothing, go on.’

‘That was about all. What kind of what?’

‘I was going to ask what kind of place the orphanage was, since we were talking of Lowood and all that. But…I don’t want to pry,’ he adds after a moment, then looks back up and smiles at Jared. ‘You said that to me the first night in London—probably nothing to you, but everybody’s been prying at me. All these months since last summer, everybody I know, everyone at home, everyone in the department, everyone in Belson’s department, everyone in the Apostles, _everyone_ keeps prying me open like a mussel. Trying to. And then you didn’t make me tell you anything. I liked that. Since we’re being very sincere and modern today, I thought I would tell you.’

The gratitude is genuine, Jared thinks, but it’s also a mild reminder: _prying is unwelcome._ Hendricks doesn’t appreciate being forced to show his hand. Even after a month, Jared doesn’t know many details about him; today’s revelation of _no older brothers_ is a new piece of data. 

‘Well, it was a Catholic orphanage,’ says Jared, to demonstrate that the world won’t explode if you talk openly. ‘In Grass Valley, which was a gold rush town up in the northern end of the state. Mount St. Mary’s Convent and Orphan Asylum. It was run by the Sisters of Mercy, who were very well-meaning. You know, things weren’t perfect there, but it was a big improvement on other places I’d lived. You could set your watch by those nuns. They were great teachers, too. I still write to Sister Mary John sometimes.’

‘Do you really?’

‘Of course.’

‘What on earth about?’

‘Oh, everything. She’s like you, she doesn’t care for economics because it’s too practical, but she’s crazy for physics. I try to send her copies of good articles, when I come across them. I wrote her two weeks ago to tell her about your machine idea.’

This was meant to be complimentary, but it seems to only land halfway. ‘That’s not—I mean, I’m—it’s not ready for that,’ Hendricks says, flushing. ‘It’s not ready to be told to just…just anybody. Not that—’

‘I’m sorry, Hendricks, I didn’t think you’d mind.’

‘No, I don’t, I really don’t.’ He’s struggling to put something into words. ‘But with anybody other than a nun halfway across the world, you know…I simply—it’s easier for me if…’

This time, Jared has pity on him. ‘If I’m the only one you talk to about it?’

‘Yes. Thank you, yes.’ But he does soldier on a little further, trying to explain. ‘Because if you tell someone, and she tells someone else, and so on, then…well, people will start to pick apart that version of the idea. With all its mistakes still there for everyone to see. I can’t go round to everyone and update them, to tell them all that I’ve fixed this inaccuracy or tightened up this loose connection or framed a question better. But you don’t think less of me for having a primitive argument or a weak point—you’ll ask questions, you’ll _tell_ me when something’s not convincing, but you won’t…you never dismiss me,’ Hendricks says, picking at a split in the wood of the tabletop. ‘So I like to just…leave things with you, while I’m still working on them.’

If the tea hadn’t already warmed Jared through, that would do it. Not only that he’s been trusted with a confidence, which is the specific province of friendship, but because Hendricks is making the effort to say as much. ‘Then it’s just for us.’

* * *

Richard has kept a journal since he was eleven, ciphered with a simple Caesar shift. Easy to break, if anyone cared, but nobody does. By now he knows the cipher so well that he can write it fluently. The journal embarrasses him, and has ever since it fell into enemy hands one day when he was fourteen. Although the stupid mob didn’t decipher the words, they understood everything else: the edges of the paper that were wavy from absorbing Richard’s sweat, the crabbed handwriting, the lengthy entries. Most damning of all, there aren’t any numbers. It’s very obviously a document of passion. Feelings. The other schoolboys absorbed this at once, without needing to think about it: ‘Composing your love-letters in here, are you? Mustn’t waste that scented pink paper on inkblots. What if you misspelled _buggery_ or something, now that wouldn’t do, would it? Are you sending one to Pinsent? Now that you’ve seen his goods in the shower?’

He doesn’t even like to think of it as a journal anymore. Notebook, it’s a notebook. And sometimes he jots down an observation in there; why not? As well as shopping lists, his mileage on runs, the costs of stamps and long-distance telephone calls he places to his father, and so on. He fills the pages up with commonplaces to camouflage anything he might write in there that would hurt.

> To London with D., who’s never seen any of the Sumerian collection at the British Museum. He went once when he first got here and got lost in the mummies, happens to the best of us. I wanted to make a week-end of it but it seemed awkward to ask. Really no idea what his situation is like, given things he’s said, so I don’t like to push him to things he can’t afford. I’d happily foot the bill but then _that’s_ awkward and if he ever finds out my proclivities then it will look shabby.
> 
> Unless he’s the same. But I can’t tell.
> 
> Anyway, we had a good day of it. Talked a lot of sexagesimal numeral systems re Sumerian astronomy, or at least I did and D. let me go on and on. He was very taken by the finery of Queen Puabi.
> 
> No miles today, simply fell into bed. 

  
   


> D. very ill this week, dreadful. I thought my digestion was delicate but it seems his is worse, as he ate something wrong and has been suffering the punishment for days. I only found out because his flatmate told me, and I almost wish I didn’t know because D. was mortified. No idea what to do so I left him a book. Lectures by Hadamard in French, which I’m not even sure he reads. It was all I had with me. I don’t know what I was thinking.
> 
> 13 miles today and it did absolutely no good, still awake for hours thinking and being filthy.

  
   


> Rather disappointing news as I learned that a fellow at Princeton is already working on a paper answering the _Entscheidungsproblem._ I’ve written him to see how he’s going about it, and D. says it might be a completely different solution and nothing for me to worry about. Independent discoveries happen all the time. But it’s spoiled my confidence. The whole business with the tape machines now seems stupidly clunky and lacking any elegance and surely Princeton will have something sleek as a bullet. Jolly good thing I haven’t told anyone but D. (I wonder if it would seem silly and desperate to ask what Sister Mary John thought of my machines.) (It would.)
> 
> 14.2 miles if the Ordnance Survey map can be believed, but I never quite trust them to a decimal place. Call it 14. Fell asleep early but then woke in the night plagued with thoughts.

* * *

On the last Saturday evening before the end of term, the Apostles are having a lacklustre meeting at Chugtai’s rooms in Clare College. They’ve exhausted their discussion topic and are focused now on eating and picking at each other. Bachman and Gilfoyle have found something to disagree about, although Jared missed the first half of the argument and it’s now degenerated to Bachman calling Gilfoyle a ‘provincial Irish Papist.’

Hendricks has been on edge all evening, still preoccupied by his rival at Princeton. ‘That’s not very funny, Bachman,’ he says. ‘Dunn’s an R.C., you know.’

‘ _I’m_ not,’ says Gilfoyle, who is in fact of an obscure persuasion known as Thelema, though he likely did grow up Catholic. ‘I abhor Christianity. Bachman seems to enjoy being wrong, that’s all. No wonder he’s always so happy.’

Bachman is lighting his pipe, pleased at forcing Gilfoyle to make a retort. ‘I suppose I’d abhor it too, if I had to spend my budding manhood years whispering my libidinous exploits to a pervert in a dog collar—’

‘That’s enough.’

‘What do you care, Hendricks, are you converting?’ asks Chugtai, who’s bored enough to be playing chess with Bighead. ‘June wedding? You and Dunn need to send invitations. I’ll have my spats cleaned.’

Jared, feeling stuck in the middle, tries to settle things down. ‘I’m actually not Catholic, if it helps? I only went to a—’

‘Listen, I don’t care,’ says Hendricks to nobody in particular, snapping his notebook shut and getting to his feet, picking up his gown from the coat-stand. ‘Haven’t cared about this stupid little social club for months, actually, and I could be spending this time doing some proper _work_ before Princeton cuts my bloody feet out from under me, so if you’ll excuse me I’ll just be at home. Enjoy this—this undoubtedly fruitful discussion about, about Irish weddings. Very intellectual. Good-night.’

He slams the door hard enough to rattle the window-panes.

‘That’s not even my joke,’ says Chugtai. ‘Lytton said it last week when you weren’t here. And I’m the one he snaps at. Poor Richard, he _is_ rattled by that Princeton business.’

‘I’ll go see if he’s all right,’ says Jared.

 

He’s not. Hendricks is shuddering in the doorway of Clare’s Old Court, having puked in a flowerbed. It’s a fresh, dewy night in March, not raining although the air is pregnant with moisture. It must be some relief to Hendricks, who’s resting his cheek against the stone of the archway, eyes closed. 

‘You don’t have to fight for my honour, you know,’ Jared says quietly. ‘Or I suppose you could if my honour needed it. But Bachman didn’t offend me. I don’t even think he offended Gilfoyle.’

‘I know. I overreacted. It was stupid,’ Hendricks says, not opening his eyes. ‘And I’ll go back in and apologise. In a minute.’

‘Only if you want to.’

‘Well, I don’t. But I have to.’ Hendricks heaves twice more, but nothing else is coming up, so he wipes his mouth on the back of his hand and turns his face up to the evening sky, breathing hard.

Jared waits for a minute or two in silence with him, arms folded in his gown for a little extra warmth. There’s a couple of peppermints left in a roll in one of his sleeve-ends, so he offers one to Hendricks. ‘Let me walk you back to your rooms,’ he says presently. ‘You’ll write the others a note tomorrow and that’ll be fine. I don’t think anyone’s even angry.’

‘They wouldn’t tell you, Dunn,’ says Hendricks, irritable as people are when trying to get themselves composed. ‘They know you don’t gossip so they don’t do it in front of you.’

‘That’s not true.’ Jared doesn’t go further than that, because sometimes Hendricks gets in dark moods and speculates about who might be talking about him. It isn’t very healthy. ‘Chugtai doesn’t mean anything by ribbing us. He and Gilfoyle are just like that. Maybe you don’t realise—it’s actually remarkable that they’ll admit you’re a good thinker, sometimes. It’s praise from Caesar.’

‘Princeton’s about to rip that out of my hands too.’

‘Hendricks, I do mean this kindly, but that’s nonsense. You’ll solve dozens of problems over your career. Princeton can’t somehow _make_ you less competent, just because somebody there might have happened to find an answer first. _Might_ have. And nobody here is going to think that.’

‘But they could.’ Hendricks pushes off from the archway to walk across the court, his hands in his pockets; Jared follows. ‘I’m already—I haven’t done anything. Do you know why Bachman thinks anything I do is his business?’

‘He likes to call you his protégé.’

‘I daresay he does. Well, he’s a great mathematician, you know, even though he’s got lazy over time. Beautiful work on Diophantine sets. He has some laurels to rest on, I mean.’ Hendricks walks with Jared through another arched tunnel to the Clare Bridge over the Cam, narrow here and whipped into glittering ripples by the night wind. ‘And he took notice of me when I was one of his students. Saw me privately, introduced me to other professors, brought me along like a parrot on his shoulder wherever he went. It was—everybody was interested.’

Jared can’t imagine this sort of life, so he says, ‘That sounds exciting.’

‘It wasn’t. Nightmare. If people think you’re a genius, your mind must keep working on that level all the time. All you have to do is slip once. A bad idea, a weak argument, a slow morning, anything, someone will see it. And if you don’t slip, they’ll expect twice as much from you next time. You can never get out from under it, because no matter what you do, they still win.’ He pauses, resting his elbows on the low stone balustrade of the bridge, looking down over the water. ‘I took a long time with my degree. Stopped altogether for three years.’

‘Doing what?’

Hendricks shakes his head and shrugs, and it’s a minute before he answers. ‘Father’s business, for a bit. But when I came back, Bachman really stuck his neck out for me. I’d done some work on my own and he talked King’s into accepting it as a thesis. Bachman’s been kind but he’s done it with the understanding that—he’s like John the Baptist in his own mind, I think. He must decrease and I must increase, but the more I get done, the more he’ll be seen as the great master. An impresario, maybe, to use a Bachman sort of word. And all that would probably be fine, but I’ve produced _nothing_ , Dunn. It’s all been nothing but promises and everyone is getting impatient. The Princeton thing will be absolutely typical. That’s why it drove me mad when Belson tried to steal that work on the Bentham algorithm. He can bloody well let me have my scraps.’

Jared listens to this story, leaning on the railing next to Hendricks. He’s sceptical, in a way; the rough outline of events probably did go like that, but in Jared’s experience, Hendricks isn’t a particularly good judge of other people’s motives. It’s also Jared’s experience that arguing with him about this is unlikely to be profitable. ‘Maybe you’re right,’ he says. ‘I hope I haven’t made you feel that way. Like a battery hen that has to lay a theorem every day or be sent to the chopping block.’

‘No.’ Hendricks half smiles.

‘So it’s not _really_ everyone who’s impatient with you.’

‘Everyone less one.’

‘I’d argue for the others too, Hendricks, but I don’t know what they’re thinking.’

Hendricks gives a single exhalation of a laugh. ‘You’ve seen me sick in a flowerbed, Dunn, this is really quite intimate. You must call me Richard. Especially if we’re to be married in June.’

Jared’s been hoping for awhile now that this particular fissure would open up; he didn’t want to read a moment wrong and ask too early, making himself look like an American hayseed. ‘Richard, then. And you can call me Jared.’

‘Not Donald?’

‘Not anymore.’ 

‘Why not? I mean—you can’t possibly like it that Belson couldn’t remember your name.’

‘I don’t, but it’s nothing to do with him.’

‘But it’s your name.’

Jared knows he can’t explain this in a way that anyone else will understand. ‘When I was…I don’t remember most of this, I was too young. Five or six, maybe. The way one of my families told it, I came from the Howard Mission and Home for Little Wanderers in the Bowery in New York. I had that part memorised. One day they gave me a new suit of clothes, a haircut, scrubbed me all over. They handed me a suitcase and a Bible and put me on a train. I didn’t know where it was going. It would stop in Indiana and Kansas and a few other places, going west, and every place we stopped, we had to file off the train and go to some…it would be a town hall or like that. We’d get up on stage and recite poems, if we knew them. Songs, jokes, anything to make people take notice. And the locals would come up to us and look in our mouths—you know, the way farmers do with horses?’

‘Right.’

‘Because they needed farmhands. They wanted us healthy. They’d ask us about our parents. Kids on the train told me that I should say I was Irish. Or German, sometimes, but not Jewish, which is what I was. Because they said everyone knows the Jews take care of their own, so there must be something wrong with me if…you understand?’

They’re both watching the river, not each other, but Richard nods. 

‘So when we stopped in California, I said I was Irish. An Irish boy had just been adopted from the train at the last stop, and his name was Dunn, so I used that. I said my mother worked in a shirt factory and my father was killed in an accident on the docks. That neither of them was a drunk or a criminal. People believed that blood would tell. It was hard being told to lie when I didn’t want to, but it got easier when…well, time went by and kids forget things. And it’s been so long that I don’t remember what my mother called me, but it wasn’t Donald, so it might as well be Jared. So that’s that, and that’s also why you don’t need to snap at Bachman if he makes jokes about the Pope.’

‘Of course. Yes. I won’t, then.’ Richard takes a breath to say something else, then changes his mind and falls quiet again. ‘Whatever you’d rather be called, Jared, really. After all that you deserve to decide.’ Then: ‘You’ll come home with me for the Easter holiday, won’t you? I can’t leave you kicking around here alone for a month.’

‘Oh, I’ll be quite all right. I don’t want to impose.’

‘You’re not imposing, I’m inviting you. It’s nothing special, we haven’t a grand estate in the country or anything like that. But I’d just—I’d like you to be there,’ says Richard. ‘I shall try to be amusing and not…this.’

‘There’s nothing wrong with this.’

 

Jared takes Richard home, and doesn’t leave right away. Richard has fallen into a mood, and Jared’s realising that it’s more serious than he thought. Perhaps it’s easy to brush off Richard’s odd nervous spells because they always seem so irrational—it’s obvious to everybody else that Princeton won’t be a disaster, and that Chugtai was kidding around, and that an angel with a flaming sword isn’t going to drive anyone out of Cambridge for one bad paper. If it even is bad. But these catastrophes are still very real to Richard, who seems to be already experiencing their dread and misery even though they haven’t happened yet. 

It’s not the way Jared feels things; when he falls to pieces it’s because of the past, not the future. The future doesn’t even seem very real to him. He tries to piece it together with plans and fantasies, but it never quite feels plausible that he’ll live to be forty. It’s just like his childhood dreams of planning his escape with Harriet Tubman, just a nice thought.

But here’s Richard on the lumpy sofa in his rooms, splitting half a bottle of Bristol Cream into two glasses because he’s forgotten that Jared took the pledge. Clearly, the future is oppressively real for him. ‘I just want to sleep. I haven’t slept properly in a week. Noises in the street wake me, or—I don’t have nightmares but I wake up soaked in sweat. As if someone hosed me down. And I think, ten more minutes at the desk. It’ll be like August Kekulé’s dream. You know that story, don’t you? Kekulé dreamed about atoms circling each other, an _ouroboros_ of atoms, and when he woke up he knew it was the secret of how a benzene ring was formed. If I get out of bed and get back to work right away, I might have some grand insight like that. But there’s nothing.’

‘Of course there’s nothing, you’re exhausted. You can’t work without sleeping. No sherry for me, thank you.’

‘That’s right, sorry.’ Richard puts the stopper back in the bottle. ‘The thing is I can’t sleep without working. That’s the problem here. Running helps, but not always.’ He downs the glass without pleasure, like medicine. ‘There are nightmares, actually, but I can’t remember them. So it’s as if they didn’t even happen. I hear myself screaming, which must be heaven for the neighbours, and the sound wakes me up. But whatever happened to make me scream, it’s gone.’

Jared’s been feeling out of his depth when it comes to Richard’s nerves, but he’s more familiar with this. ‘I had friends at the orphanage like that.’

‘Did they ever get better? The sleeping problems, I mean.’

‘When life got a little easier for them, yes. Hard times would bring it all back. You must try to relax. If you get ready for bed I’ll sit with you, all right?’ says Jared. ‘I’ll leave when you’re asleep.’

‘I don’t need you to…’ Richard trails off, looking up at Jared, then unstoppers the bottle again to pour the rest out into his glass. Downs it. ‘Please don’t wear yourself out, Jared. I don’t want to be such a bore that you get tired of me.’

‘I’m not bored. And I’m not worn out.’ Jared takes the empty bottle and glass away, setting them on the tea-tray for Mrs Moffat to come and collect later. But after a moment of tidying, he ventures to ask for a reassurance of his own: ‘You’d do the same for me, wouldn’t you?’

It comes at once. ‘Of course. Of course I would.’

‘Then there’s no problem, is there? Go wash up.’

Richard looks as though he half wants to argue, but he gets up and heads down the hall to the W.C. Jared busies himself with gathering stray books and putting them either on the desk or the bookshelves, placing markers in the pages, smoothing cracked spines. He knows better than to touch anything else made of paper, including the crumpled balls of it in the wastebasket; last week Richard cheerfully admitted to digging through a garbage pail in the street to find some wrongly-discarded scrap of his notes. Jared would never throw any of this away—the scratchy shapes of letters, numbers, logical symbols, Greek and even Hebrew letters feel as familiar as Richard’s voice.

When Richard comes back, he shuts himself in the bedroom to change while Jared banks the fire and pulls the panel of the screen back over the fireplace. He steals back to the bookcase, fingertips grazing over the spines, looking for something soothing. Perhaps, if he’s lucky, a book that Richard loves as much as Jared loves his battered old copy of _Jane Eyre._ Most of the books aren’t like that, but tucked into one corner beside a book on optics, Jared finds a copy of Oscar Wilde’s _A House of Pomegranates_. The pages are so worn that they’ve lost their crispness, falling limp and soft like the leaves of a Bible.

In his room, Richard is settling uneasily into bed. It’s very Spartan in here, little more than the mismatched second-hand furniture that came with the room. One of the only decorations is a strange white rock that looks like a piece of the moon: rough-textured, heavy, shedding a fine pale dust on the bedside table. ‘What’s this?’ Jared asks, sitting down on the edge of the bed.

‘Paperweight,’ Richard says as he mashes one of his pillows into shape. The thing is flat and lank, so no wonder he’s not been sleeping well. ‘It’s a Micraster fossil from home. Upper Cretaceous, about ninety million years old. Sea urchin.’

‘May I?’

Richard nods as he lies down, and Jared picks up the sea urchin fossil, tracing a fingertip over the delicate marking on top. It’s about the size and shape of a human heart. ‘Common as pins. In the Bronze Age they used to bury people with dozens of these lying around them,’ Richard says, watching Jared’s hands. ‘There’s a grave in Bedfordshire with a mother’s bones surrounded by two hundred Micraster fossils. Shepherd’s crowns. Other people say thunderstones.’

It makes Jared smile. ‘Oh, so they’re magic. What do they do?’

‘The same thing any fossils do,’ Richard says, but he’s smiling too. ‘Lie in state. What I heard is that if you spit on one and throw it away over your left shoulder—I think it’s left—you’ll have good luck. But I also heard that if you keep it forever then you’ll never be struck by lightning.’

‘Well, you haven’t been, have you?’

‘The night is young. No, people used to get spooky about them because the shape on top is usually a star, like the rose of Venus you see when you split an apple,’ says Richard, reaching over to touch the X on top of the stone as Jared holds it. ‘On this one the top point’s been rubbed away by time so it’s more like a cross.’

 _Cross my heart and hope to die_ , Jared thinks, a childhood legal formula that he could never bring himself to pronounce. He wants to put the lamp out and lie down beside Richard, but he knows that this is a gesture of significant trust from his reticent friend. To take advantage of this closeness would be wrong. And Richard is so plainly exhausted, his eyes shadowed.

‘Just lie back,’ Jared says, his hand closing over Richard’s for a moment before he leans over to set the fossil back on the table. ‘I’ll read to you until you drift off.’ 

So Richard does, and Jared lets the book fall open to _The Birthday of the Infanta_ …which is far too depressing to read on a night like this, so he flips forward to _The Star-Child_ instead. _‘Once upon a time two poor Woodcutters were making their way home through a great pine-forest. It was winter, and a night of bitter cold. The snow lay thick upon the ground, and upon the branches of the trees: the frost kept snapping the little twigs on either side of them, as they passed: and when they came to the Mountain-Torrent she was hanging motionless in air, for the Ice-King had kissed her. So cold was it that even the animals and the birds did not know what to make of it...’_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Feel free to [follow on Tumblr](http://doctorcolubra.tumblr.com) if you like!


	3. Interlude: Saints

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> An off-the-cuff one-shot for Valentine's Day, first posted on Tumblr. It _is_ canon and would take place during the last chapter, probably not far from the journal entry about going to the British Museum together. As silly as the conceit might seem, it's taken from the Turing biography.

Hendricks says nothing about Valentine’s Day until the day is nearly over, when he’s about to leave Jared’s rooms for the evening, and it’s only because his gaze happens to fall on the little pile of envelopes by the door.

‘I say, that’s a lot of pink in the post today.’

Jared doesn’t like to boast, so he only shrugs and smiles. ‘Well, you know.’ Receiving a blank look, he elaborates, ‘Maybe it seems sentimental, but I think it’s a cheerful little holiday.’

‘Oh, is it St Valentine’s already?’ Hendricks says, glancing down again at the neat little stack of pink envelopes. ‘I wonder how they know.’

‘I don’t follow.’

‘How they calculate it. Like with Easter. It moves about, you never know when it’s going to happen.’

Jared has never been more baffled by something Hendricks said which was so simple. ‘I…it’s always on the fourteenth of February.’

‘No. Really?’

‘I think you’ll find it is.’

‘But it’s been in March before.’

‘I don’t like to contradict people but no, it hasn’t. It doesn’t…it’s the day that Saint Valentine was martyred, it’s on the calendar,’ Jared says helplessly. ‘You’ve never noticed it?’

‘Well, of course I’ve _noticed_ Valentine’s Day, Dunn,’ Hendricks says. ‘I mean, I noticed it just now, that's—that’s why we’re talking of it. You must…have a lot of, um, friends of the…um. The distaff persuasion.’

Oh. ‘I have friends who _are_ ladies, but nothing…’ For once Jared would like to use a slippery little euphemism here, because he’s not sure what Hendricks thinks of him on this front and it’s untoward to say too much. Hendricks is a very chaste sort. ‘We’re not involved. We like the little cards so we send them, that’s all.’

Hendricks seems acutely conscious of having embarrassed himself by asking any questions at all, and dismisses the conversation with a few halting _yes of course obviously_ sort of comments, then changes the subject to lunar calendars and thereby to the orbit of the moon.

The next morning, Jared stops at the stationer’s and picks up a valentine postcard—it’s a childish one, but it mentions curly hair and seems pleasant enough without being…untoward. _See you next March_ he writes on the back before dropping it in the box.

To his surprise, he comes back to his rooms that afternoon to find a postcard as well, but it's—well, it’s green. An old-fashioned couple in stage-Irish clothes are parading under a flag with the golden harp on it, and the legend says _Let Erin’s glory inspire the heart to noble deeds._ Hendricks’ blotty, spidery handwriting looks as slipshod as usual, spilling around chaotically with no lines to guide it.

_My dear Dunn_  
_I know this is the wrong one but the shops were out of pink things. I might have been looking in the wrong place. You’re the first who ever sent me a valentine if you can believe it (you can). Belated happy etc. anyway and I suppose an early happy St Patrick’s Day after all. Yours always, R.P.H._


	4. The Romance of the Telescope

On Thursday afternoon, with the weather green and grey, Richard and Jared are at the Warrior Square train station in St Leonards-on-Sea. Handsome little red-brick station with white trim, the familiar blast of sea air when they step off the train. 

Richard hasn’t brought anyone home for Easter in many years. David was the last one. Bighead has invited him to stay a few times—they have a rambling, comfortable suburban house in Reading, unpretentious as Bighead always is. Richard’s never had any other close friends; he used to have a few school chums who were more like fellow survivors of a brutal invasion, completely disparate personalities who were only banding together to keep from being annihilated. It wasn’t the same as liking, or being liked. (David had been the last of that too.) Richard doesn’t see any of them anymore, and he might not even recognise them on the street. Meanwhile, Chugtai is merely tolerant (on a good day), and Gilfoyle would never invite anyone home for Easter. Too busy around that time of year; lots of Black Masses or something with his odd friends. 

In the station, Jared is fixing Richard’s tie. Richard often sees Jared’s eyes drifting down to his collar, but his attention never feels unkind. Only as though he’s longing to put things right, which is what he does in the comparative privacy of the gents’. The thin spring light is seeping into this bare, beige room from the high windows, as Richard rests his weight against the radiator and Jared shows him how to tie a bow-tie. Richard’s not learning anything. 

‘It took me ages at school to even learn the half-Windsor,’ Richard’s saying, trying not to act as though every neuron in his brain is waiting to feel the tips of Jared’s fingers brush over the bare skin of his neck. ‘But of course I wasn’t the sort who—I mean, I was a prefect, but it’s not as though anyone respected me. They’d put sodium bicarbonate in my chamber-pot so it’d foam up, steal my candles at night. And one morning a boy named Barnes came in the washroom while I was shaving. My tie was a disaster—like now—and my sleeves were loose; you know I can’t bear them being buttoned up a second longer than they must. I suppose I did look a mess, but Barnes said so and had a laugh…which is nothing, really. I went on with shaving, but he kept to it. On and on. ‘Hendricks, you look a disgusting sight.’ I had to cane him because those were the rules, younger boys aren’t to be cheeky, but when we went out to the corridor—'

‘Yes?’ Jared has a knack for tying the knot backwards or forwards, on himself or someone else, but this time he isn’t satisfied with his work and turns Richard around so that his back is to Jared before the mirror. ‘You had to hit him, really?’

‘I meant to, but then before I had a chance…’ Jared’s arms are around his shoulders, and Richard is watching his own face very carefully in the mirror to be sure that none of his expressions will give him away. ‘On the backstroke, I heard crockery breaking behind me. There was a tray of the prefects’ tea things in the corridor behind me and I hadn’t noticed, so the cane knocked the whole thing over.’

‘Oh dear.’

‘Laughingstock.’

‘Well,’ says Jared, evening the loops of the bow carefully, ‘We can’t have that. Let me see your cuffs.’

 

Jared, for his part, is trying to contain his excitement. He loves to see other people’s houses—loves it a little too much, in fact. It’s like being on an archaeological dig and coming upon a perfectly-preserved room, full of unknown clues and treasures. The fascination sometimes makes him nosy, wanting to look at the bookshelves and open the pantry, so he reins himself in with a tight sense of etiquette. _Don’t be a bad guest, don’t make him regret that he allowed you this…_

 _Baston Lodge_ is what Richard tells the cabbie, and presently they pull up at a great stone house that, to Jared, seems palatial. Perched on a steep road and girdled with garden walls and iron gates, the house has an Italianate squared tower and a glass conservatory, which is foggy with condensation but full of greenery. ‘My goodness, Hendricks, I don’t know why you were so bashful about this place. It’s beautiful. Is that a stable?’

‘What? Oh yes, it used to be,’ Richard says, distracted as he pays the cabbie and gets out. ‘Well—yes, the house is all right. Sir Rider Haggard used to live across the street, actually, when I was young. Died a few years ago. You’ve got your suitcase?’

‘Yes, thank you. Sir Rider Haggard the author, really?’

Richard unlatches the gate to let them in. ‘When I was a boy—before I went away to school, even—I saw something glittering in a storm drain. That one right there, by your foot. When I got close I saw that it was a piece of ladies’ jewellery, a brooch of diamonds and sapphires. Mother’s certainly not the type of lady to lose a diamond brooch in the street, so I went across to give it to Lady Haggard. She hugged me and gave me two shillings.’

Jared has never been completely clear on the Hendricks’ social class, especially since Richard is habitually vague about his background. He’s like a loose button, connected to his past by only a few overstressed threads. But a neat little housemaid opens the door and a man comes to take their suitcases, and Richard only remembers at the last second to introduce them. ‘Oh—Dunn, this is Bridget, and this is Mr Duffin. Is Colonel Hendricks at home, Bridget?’

‘In the library, sir.’

‘We only have to say good afternoon,’ Richard says to Jared as they head down a quiet hallway to the library. Obliquely, he added, ‘Father doesn’t really get much entertainment from talking to people.’

The library is brighter than Jared was expecting, with tall narrow windows looking out over a primly-kept but lovely back garden. Richard’s father is a portly man whose short torpedo-shaped beard still has some streaks of red, and he’s immediately identifiable by his profile, the same aquiline nose bent over a newspaper. 

He didn’t look up until Richard cleared his throat slightly and said, ‘Good afternoon, sir.’

‘Oh, yes, good afternoon. Back from Duroliponte, hm? Who’s your friend?’

‘This is Jared Dunn, we met at the Apostles’ meetings. He’s working for Professor Belson at the moment.’ Richard’s voice is toneless, his expression unreadable. ‘He’s from California so I thought it would be nice to invite him for the holiday. Mother said he’d be welcome.’

‘Jolly good, yes. What about your other friend?’

Richard stutters. ‘My other—beg pardon, sir?’

‘Telephoned earlier today. Loud fellow. Mr Bodkin.’

‘…Bachman, sir?’

‘Bodkin rang and said he had a message for you, which was urgent—he said you must ring him back at once. Now, if you absolutely must, you may ring him _but_ ,’ says Colonel Hendricks, raising a monitory finger, ‘no lengthy conversations. Telephone calls cost the earth nowadays.’

‘Yes, sir,’ says Richard, hurrying over to the telephone on the desk. 

‘You will find, one day, that my cave of treasures is finite.’

‘Right-o, Father.’

‘And don’t say right-o.’

Richard turns aside, rolling his eyes as he asks the operator for Bachman’s rooms, and gets passed around the switchboard a bit before he’s connected and someone answers. ‘Hullo, yes, is Dr Bachman there?’

‘Dick.’ Gilfoyle’s bone-dry drawl. ‘We found out what’s happening with Princeton. Bachman opened your mail.’

‘What? Why—never mind, what does Princeton say? Can you read it to me?’

‘No lengthy conversations!’ Colonel Hendricks repeats from his chair. ‘They may forward a letter here if they can bear to part with a penny.’

‘If you—just a moment, please,’ Richard says, holding the receiver against his shoulder to muffle it. ‘Father, for heaven’s sake, I’ll reimburse you for the phone call.’

‘Ha. Famous last words,’ Colonel Hendricks remarks, getting his watch out to time the conversation. ‘Well, go ahead, then.’

‘Thank you. —Go on, Gilfoyle, let’s have it.’

There’s a scuffle at the other end of the line, and Erlich takes the phone away from Gilfoyle. ‘Hendricks! Genius of the restoration!’ It’s mid-afternoon but he’s clearly drunk. ‘Fantastic news. Keynes is speaking in London tonight and he’s drawn a bit of a crowd, so we thought we’d run to the pub for a few hours beforehand—we need a few drinks in us to face a whole night of sawdust about the gold standard. Pity Dunn’s missing it, he’s the only one who’s interested.’

‘Oh, yes, too bad—Bachman, if you could just tell me about the letter—'

‘Yes! The letter! So we were absolutely blind in a few hours, and forgot that you and Dunn were down there in Hastings. “Let’s fetch Dunn and Hendricks,” says I. “Poor old Richard needs cheering up.” God, we laughed when we got to your rooming-house. But our man Chugtai noticed that you’ve a letter on the table with an American stamp. We thought you wouldn’t mind.’

‘Well—I don’t, really,’ says Richard, who would like to be cross about this if he had the time for it, but his father is making wind-it-up gestures already. ‘If you could only read it—’

‘Of course!’ Bachman rattles the paper and clears his throat. ‘“Dear Hendricks, I can easily see how my recent paper on calculable numbers concerning the _Entscheidungsproblem_ must have held a rather painful interest for you. The typescript of your paper, which you kindly included with your last letter, uses a definition of calculable numbers for the same purpose. Your treatment of the problem, however, is different from my lambda-calculus, and seems to be of great merit. I think it of great importance that you should come and work with us here at Princeton next year if that is at all possible.”’

_‘What?’_

‘He goes on. “I hope it will nevertheless be possible for you to publish the paper. The methods are to a large extent different, and the problem is so important that different treatments of it should be of interest. I would champion your application for the Procter Fellowship here (my uncle is well-connected), and I daresay a supplementary grant would be easy to get as well. Whatever you decide, I wish to extend you congratulations on a very elegant and important piece of work. Yours sincerely, Jìan-Yáng.”’

Richard’s head is spinning, and it occurs to him that this might all be a great wind-up from the others. Bachman, a natural raconteur, can still manage phrases like _supplementary grant_ while three sheets to the wind. ‘Bachman, I…is this _real_?’

‘Of course it’s real.’

‘It would be a bit dreadful of you to do this as a prank.’

‘Hendricks, stop being such a miserable article. It’s exactly what we’ve been telling you all along—there was nothing wrong with that paper, and there’s nothing wrong with your career. You can go to Princeton for Michaelmas term! That’s exciting,’ Bachman informs him, put out that he didn’t get the reaction he wanted. ‘It’s good news. We wanted you to know.’

‘Yes. Of course, yes, you’re quite right. Thank you, Bachman, I’m…well, I’m stunned, is what. But I don’t wish to keep you on the line—’

‘Tell Dunn we said hullo. Was that your father I spoke with earlier? Deaf old goat. We’ll see you when you’re back in the land of the living, Hendricks. You’ll need a good sending-off if you’ll be going to Princeton.’

Richard thanks him and hangs up, not a moment too soon.

‘Three minutes, thirty seven seconds,’ says his father. ‘And we must round up, since that’s what the telephone company will do. Four minutes. I’ll add it to your bill.’

‘I’m happy to cover it, Father,’ Richard says, then backs out of the room with Jared to beat a hasty retreat upstairs.

‘What did the letter say?’ Jared asks as Richard shuts the bedroom door behind them. 

‘It said my paper was…good,’ Richard says in disbelief, sinking down on the edge of the bed. Mr Duffin has already brought the luggage in, neatly lined up by the door. The room is under the eaves, because the sound of rain on the roof always helped him sleep as a child; the maid would ordinarily sleep up here, so she took a room on the second floor for her own quarters. Jared is bent nearly double under the sloped ceilings. ‘It said that Mr Jìan—the man in Princeton—his solution to the problem was different enough to mine that we can both be published. And he was very keen to have me study there.’

Jared was all set to be transported with ecstasy at the news, but that last sentence knocks him back. Physically, even; he cracks the back of his head against the ceiling and has to sit down beside Richard. ‘Goodness. You’re not…are you thinking of going?’

‘I don’t know. I only just found out.’

‘True.’

‘You have to stay here to finish up Belson’s work, don’t you?’

‘I don’t think I can escape very soon. I complain about Belson when I’ve really no right to say anything,’ says Jared reluctantly. ‘Studying with him, breathing the same air as Keynes—it’s a tremendous opportunity for someone like me.’

‘Naturally.’

‘I would miss you awfully, you know.’

Jared can hear Richard’s throat click when he swallows. ‘I believe I’d miss you very much too,’ he says.

 

Friday morning is silvery with rain, but around the corner from Baston Lodge, St John the Evangelist is having its parish fete for the Easter season. Crowds of wet umbrellas, shiny and beetle-black, cluster on the church’s side-lawn. Jared had never been to one of these events and finds it amusing, so they stop at every stall: they buy tickets for the tombola, and Jared wins a jar of ginger marmalade; they shy balls at coconuts balanced on posts (neither of them wins anything); someone recognises Richard and asks him to award the prize for a round of children’s foot-races. 

There’s also a dark little tent that they first think is closed. ‘That’s a little Irishwoman in the parish,’ someone tells them when they ask. ‘She tells fortunes. Just for fun, you know.’

‘Oh, we must try it,’ says Jared, bending over to clear the tent’s low entry. ‘I’ve never had my fortune told. The nuns always told us it was wicked.’

‘It’s not wicked, but it’s nonsense. I’m not spending 5p on that.’

‘Go on, you’d only waste it anyway,’ says the little Irishwoman from inside, a wizened creature with owlish spectacles. Eyeing Jared, she says, ‘Gracious, look at the size of you—sit down, lad, let me see your palm.’

Jared sits down in front of her card-table, holding out his hand, which the fortune-teller turns over, rubbing his palm stiffly with the pad of her thumb to make the lines stand out. Richard hovers around the doorway but seems content to watch.

‘Oh my dear,’ says the Irishwoman, frowning at Jared’s palm. ‘When’s your birthday, hen?’

‘September twenty fifth,’ Jared says.

‘I’m not surprised. Now, see, you let people take advantage of you, my son. Such a sweet nature. These breaks and circles in your life-line—you had to leave your home when you were young, didn’t you? And it must have been ghastly, look, the line cuts off altogether and starts again. Were you sick?’

Jared is taken aback. ‘I—briefly, yes, scarlet fever went through the orphanage…’

‘There we are. But you came out the winner in the end. Good long head-line, very considerate, very intelligent. You’re a professional man, you work with your mind. Some chains on your heart-line: you give yourself away very easily and then there’s nothing left of you, poor soul. Are you thinking of marrying soon?’

‘I…no, ma’am.’

‘Nobody special?’

Jared isn’t easily embarrassed, after years of living with people who did their best to make him ashamed. But he’s gone red at the backs of his ears. Behind him, Richard has stopped fidgeting and gone still. ‘I suppose…I do have affections.’

The Irishwoman takes his left hand as well, spreading his fingers, turning his hands this way and that under the light. ‘She’s a shy lady. Very clever. Too clever by half, no doubt. Doesn’t like to tell you what she’s feeling—deep down she’s afraid you’ll reject her. Though I expect she likes to act above it all. You know better than that, though, eh? She might not be the one you marry, but she’s the one you’ll never forget.’

‘Oh.’

‘Marry her quick, if she’s free—that’s my advice,’ says the Irishwoman. ‘You might not get another chance. Now, sit your friend down and let him have a go.’

Jared gets up to let Richard sit down next—they’re both a bit spooked, and no longer in the mood to argue. 

The lady squints at Richard through her thick glasses. ‘Oh, it’s the Hendricks boy, I hardly knew you. Not showing your feed much these days, are you? Nothing but a fart in the mist. Let’s see your hand, son.’ Richard offers her his hand (his cuffs, once again, are undone). ‘Dear me.’

‘What is it?’

‘You’ll come to a bad end,’ says the lady, frowning down at his palm. She glances back at Jared. ‘Would you give us a few moments alone, pet?’

Jared looks to Richard, who looks discomfited but only shrugs in response. ‘I’ll be right outside when you’re done,’ he says.

Outside the fortune-teller’s tent, the rain patters softly on Jared’s umbrella for a few moments. Presently Richard comes out.

‘What did she say?’ Jared asks him. ‘Goodness, you’re white as a sheet.’

‘Am I?’

‘Come along and sit down,’ says Jared, bringing him over to a bench that’s not too wet. ‘I can’t believe she rattled you like that. You don’t put any stock in fortune-tellers.’

‘Nor do I.’ Richard folds his umbrella again, looking downhill at the fete; the gardens slope sharply from here, and you can see the grey strip of the sea at the bottom of the street. ‘And I’m not starting to, either. But…well. She knew about David—of course it wasn’t a secret, but—’

‘Who’s David?’

‘A friend of mine, from…from when we were young. At school. Dotheboys Hall,’ he says wryly. ‘Father always says that, whenever I complain about the place. He says I make it sound Dickensian—its proper name is Sherborne, perfectly respectable school. But my friend David Pinsent was, um, we were very close. He was—I mean, he was miles better than me at mathematics.’

‘Better than _you_?’

‘Incredible mind. Incredible. And…I have his picture here.’ Richard reaches for the inner breast pocket of his jacket and hands Jared a tiny school photograph, creased a few times, its edges furred from handling. The boy in the picture is only about fifteen, with a pleasant smile, a gap in his front teeth. Unassuming. ‘He was very…he reminded me of you, a bit.’

‘How so?’

‘Very…oh, you know,’ says Richard, smiling down at the picture. ‘He didn’t approve of dirty talk. Once or twice I tried to shock him but it didn’t work out. He wasn’t shocked. Not priggish, but—above it. He made me want to be good,’ he says, after taking a moment to choose his words. ‘I cared about what I was in his eyes.’

Jared isn’t jealous by nature; when someone likes him, he doesn’t see any reason to quibble over such technicalities. But he’s been in the habit of thinking that Richard’s affection for him is something out of the ordinary, something that Richard doesn’t lavish upon very many people. ‘You’ve never mentioned him before.’

‘Well. He died young. He was only eighteen.’

‘I’m very sorry.’

‘I don’t think he liked me as much as I liked him,’ Richard says softly, taking the photograph back. ‘His mother thought we were great friends. She used to—God, this is embarrassing—Mother and I wrote letters to her after David died, and I suppose I was so…demonstrative that she believed we were thick as thieves. Invited me over to their house, took me along on holidays. When really, it took me some time to get David to take me seriously at all. He was a year older than me, and you know how important that seems when you’re young. But once he did start to take notice of me…we both loved astronomy, you see. I made him a star-globe out of an old glass lampshade, which I filled with plaster of Paris. Once I struck off the glass, I marked in the constellations of the fixed stars. Woke up at four in the morning every day for a week to take observations from the sky. I suppose an atlas would’ve been quicker, and more accurate, but—I didn’t want to do things the easy way, when it was for David.’

Jared’s belly feels cold. Second-hand grief; he almost doesn’t want to hear the end of the story. ‘I’m sure he was very pleased.’

‘He was. We had all gone home at the end of term, and he wrote to me about a comet at 8th mag in Delphinus. He’d already gone on to his first year at Cambridge, he was at Trinity. I used to take my telescope to bed with me so that I could look out that dormer window in my room. Good views, on a clear night. I remember looking at the moon one night and thinking—and thinking that if I didn’t get into Cambridge, I shouldn’t be able to see David again. We’d be under the same sky, looking at the same moon, but not at each other. And he would just…drift away into his own life.’ Richard is prodding the soft turf at their feet with the tip of his umbrella, not looking up at Jared. ‘Later I found out that he died right at that time of night. Bovine tuberculosis. From unpasteurised milk—his family used to have cows. They told me he’d been sickly for years, but of course I never had any idea. David never complained.’

‘That’s awful.’ Jared is watching Richard intently, what little there is to glean from his expression. ‘But…this is your own neighbourhood. Don’t you think that people like the Irish lady know that about you? Maybe not every detail, but they must remember that you had a school friend who died.’

‘I don’t know. They might. As I said, it’s not a secret. That’s not what shook me, though.’ Richard doesn’t look up. ‘She knew other things about me too.’

‘What things?’

Richard doesn’t answer for a long few moments, poking at the dirt. Then he takes a long breath, as if making up his mind about something, and says, ‘I’m a homosexual, Dunn.’

This is not precisely a surprise to Jared, although it’s surprising that Richard’s ventured to say so out loud. ‘Are you really?’

‘Yes. Not that—David and I never…did any such things. He wasn’t like that. I don’t think. But you know it’s not so outrageous to the Apostles—everyone knows Chugtai and Gilfoyle have an understanding.’

‘I did hear that. I wasn’t sure whether to believe it. They seem to hate each other.’

‘Well, that’s how they’ve always been,’ says Richard with a shrug. ‘I thought…nobody said anything like that about me? To you?’

‘All I ever hear about you is that you’re a first-rate mind and that you caused a fracas with Belson,’ says Jared, tactfully skipping over all the rumours about Richard’s sanity, which have nothing much to do with homosexuality anyway. ‘They worry about you. I’ve never heard anyone in the Apostles or anyone else speculating about your love life, to be honest.’

‘Good. Excellent. Because if…’ Richard struggles, backtracks. ‘You mustn’t think I’ve only been paying attention to you out of…I mean, this isn’t some kind of clumsy seduction, Dunn. You’re quite safe.’

‘I never thought you were trying to seduce me.’ Jared has known a few Cambridge men who seem entirely sexless; Gavin Belson is one of them, someone whose passions seem confined to academia. No wife, no interest in women, very few rumours about men. Jared had mentally sorted Richard into that category as well, and it’s strange to imagine him submerged in the sort of campy, decadent world of people like Chugtai and Lytton Strachey. ‘It doesn’t change how I think of you at all, you know.’

‘Really?’

‘Of course not, Richard. Honestly, after that bit with the valentines I thought that you rather disapproved of _me._ ’

‘You? Why on earth would I disapprove of you getting valentines?’

‘Well. The ladies in question really are only friends of mine, the same as you are, but I was afraid I seemed like a cad. With a great many irons in the fire, you know.’

‘Oh. No. That never occurred to me,’ says Richard, and laughs. His hand, gripping the edge of the bench, relaxes from its white-knuckled grip. ‘Not in the slightest. I only thought how much everyone seems to like you. You make it seem so easy.’

‘I work very hard at it, actually.’

‘I know.’

 

Richard takes Jared down to the shore for the afternoon, where they look for birds—or Jared looks for birds while Richard only takes an interest in rocks and shells, but a happy few hours nonetheless. 

 

On Saturday night, they’re alone in the house; Colonel and Mrs Hendricks are out at the Easter vigil, and although they extend a limp invitation for Richard to join them, he flatly refuses. Jared offers to go to services anyway, for the sake of politeness, but Mrs Hendricks dismisses it. ‘You boys stay here and have a visit,’ she says, patting Jared’s hand. ‘And a rest—we won’t be back until after midnight.’

With the place to themselves, Jared is at the piano in the music room while Richard pores over the offprint of Jìan-Yáng's paper, making notes for himself on a sheet of foolscap. There’s a glass of brandy at his elbow that he’s been ignoring.

Jared has always been fond of music, and in fact wrote an opera during his undergraduate years of which he’s still rather proud. He’s meandering through a book of Schubert lieder that he found in the compartment of the piano bench, picking up well-loved motifs when he finds them. Somewhere in the middle of _Der Konig in Thule_ , though, Richard surprises him by whistling the melody, without looking up from his papers.

‘I say, your pitch is very good,’ Jared remarks. ‘Did you ever learn to play?’

‘No. I’m all thumbs, useless,’ says Richard. ‘You’re not half bad, though.’

‘I’m surprised you even noticed what I was playing. I thought you were a million miles away.’

‘Well, I came back. This really is a very clever paper that Jìan-Yáng wrote, but now that I’m bloody _sane_ enough to look at it clearly, it’s…a bit pedestrian,’ says Richard, tapping the papers on the desk to align them. ‘Interesting in its own right, actually, but not the fullest solution to the Hilbert problem.’

‘Gilfoyle told you that last week.’

‘I thought he was being hard to please. He has very high standards.’

‘He does have, and he thinks highly of _you_ ,’ says Jared. ‘Not that he says so very often, but I know that’s his opinion. Chugtai’s the same.’

‘ _You_ think well of me so you assume everyone else does too,’ says Richard, although he’s smiling to himself, coming over to sit on the bench beside Jared.

Richard has long fingers that lie slightly crooked when his hands are loose; his handwriting is atrocious and he fumbles with buttons and laces. It’s easy to see that piano lessons were probably a trial for him as a child, but with his right hand he picks out the first four-and-a-half measures of Bach’s Little Fugue in G minor. ‘I can’t believe you spent months around those two and you never thought anything untoward was going on. They’re not subtle.’

‘I’m not very worldly, I suppose.’

‘You never…I suppose it’s different in America.’

‘What is?’

Even the servants have the night off. The house is empty, but still Richard keeps his voice lowered. ‘I mean—you don’t…do you have…particular friendships, in your schools?’

‘I know that New England Yankees have a certain reputation for social reserve, but yes, of course we have friendships.’

‘I don’t mean that. I mean…you know what I mean.’

‘I suppose I’m not in a position to know,’ Jared says after a moment. ‘At Yale they always…nobody was actively cruel about it, but they were always aware that I didn’t come from money. There were conversations that I wasn’t invited to join, parties I found out about on Monday morning. Which is fine, of course. No one’s under any obligation to like me.’

‘They’re idiots.’

‘No, I meant that. So—perhaps among a certain class of Americans, it works the way it does here. And there are homosexuals everywhere, not just in boarding schools.’

The word makes Richard flinch ever so slightly, even though he used it himself earlier. ‘Did you—did you ever know any before?’

‘If I did, they didn’t tell me,’ says Jared, turning a page to _Der Tod und das Mädchen_ , playing softly with his left hand, his right hand resting unmoving on the keys beside Richard’s. ‘But still, I don’t find it so shocking. I can understand…well, the male form is very beautiful. Just as beautiful as the female form, I think.’

‘In a different way, though,’ says Richard, watching Jared.

Jared swallows. ‘Not for me,’ he says finally. ‘They…affect me quite similarly.’

For an indeterminate moment, Richard’s face is unreadable. Then: ‘You might have told me,’ he says, and his left hand slips down to Jared’s lap, fingers running over his thigh. ‘Unless…?’

Jared closes his eyes briefly. ‘Unless?’

Richard’s hand freezes, then draws back. ‘Right. It’s fine, Dunn, don’t worry. I didn’t ask you here for that, after all.’

Somewhere in this exchange, Jared has inadvertently refused something that he would very much like to have. Probably the boys from old money at Yale wouldn’t have missed the signal. ‘Richard…please.’

Richard looks up at him, and Jared reaches out to straighten his tie again, smoothing it down—only one layer of cotton between his fingers and Richard’s chest. It’s electrifyingly _different_ from touching a woman, but every bit as engrossing. He keeps a light grip on the tie, playful, and draws Richard in for a kiss.

Jared’s reminded right away of Richard’s rain-washed runs to Grantchester: the ungraceful, vehement movements of his body exude a strange sensuality. Jared’s almost frightened of it at first—what if matters progress, and it all turns out to be something that should have stayed in the realm of fantasy? Richard isn’t an archaic torso of Apollo in a museum, something to be admired and then walked away from; he’ll be devastated if Jared half-accepts and then refuses him.

But Richard’s hand returns to Jared’s thigh as they kiss, and it settles the matter: Jared does indeed want this. Very much.

‘Come—the other room, come on,’ Richard murmurs, getting up from the bench and pulling Jared with him, and they duck through the hallway and up the stairs to his bedroom.

Richard parts the panels of Jared’s jacket, smoothing his palms acquisitively over Jared’s chest, pushing the jacket down from his shoulders. ‘Are you certain—’

‘I want you,’ Jared whispers, unknotting Richard’s tie, pulling it loose from his collar and unbuttoning his shirt. He’s built narrow, but taut with muscle, and the hair on his chest is lighter than the hair on his head, copper-gold in the lamplight. ‘I don’t—don’t laugh at me—’

‘I wouldn’t.’

‘I’m not sure what…which of us—’

Richard silences him with a kiss and goes on with unbuttoning his shirt. ‘We don’t have to do that,’ he whispers. ‘That’s not what I like to do. Not right away.’

Jared suspects that his experience with women is vastly greater than Richard’s experience with men, but that hardly matters now. ‘What do you like to do?’

Richard doesn’t answer immediately, unbuckling Jared’s belt. ‘Lie down? On the bed, lie down.’

They move to the bed, and Jared lies down with Richard on top of him. Richard noses at Jared’s chin, tilting his head up until he can trace his mouth down the column of Jared’s throat. In the half-darkness Jared feels Richard’s tongue run over his collarbone. ‘Oh—’ he gasps, then: ‘No, don’t stop—that feels so sweet—’ 

‘Like that?’

‘Yes…’

‘I’ve known,’ Richard whispers, his lips brushing over Jared’s suprasternal notch. ‘Ever since that first night—when you came to my rooms—I knew that I wanted to touch you…’ Jared can feel the evening roughness of Richard’s cheek against his bare skin. ‘I didn’t think I’d ever get to.’

It’s the kind of compliment that makes Jared feel shy, unworthy of occupying someone else’s mind to such a degree. But he’s discovering that while the sensations may be different with a man, the rhythms and acts aren’t so foreign after all. Which means he knows more things he can do for Richard. ‘Turn over?’ he murmurs. ‘I want to keep kissing you…’

They switch places, and Richard lies down on his belly with his cheek against the pillow. Jared straddles his narrow hips, and runs his fingertips lightly down the length of Richard’s spine. Richard’s shoulders are dusted with translucent freckles, and his back muscles relax visibly as Jared touches him. ‘That’s it,’ Jared whispers. ‘My good boy.’

Jared bends over him, kissing the nape of his neck. Lingering, breathing in Richard’s scent: Pears soap; clean, musky sweat; a trace of brilliantine in his hair, which smells vaguely of orange blossom, like a tube of lipstick. Slowly, Jared begins to trail his lips down Richard’s spine, leaving open-mouthed kisses on his skin. Tracing over the knobs of vertebrae with his tongue, following each with a kiss, the fingers of one hand trailing down the long muscles of Richard’s back, stroking softly.

It’s a place where Richard is rarely touched, sensitive and vulnerable, and he twitches reflexively when he first feels Jared’s mouth there. Burning like a brand. The very opposite of relaxing, in a pleasant way—it makes him exquisitely alert, waiting in tension for Jared’s mouth to touch him again. Knowing that it’s only seconds away but startled with pleasure every time. His breath is ragged, and as Jared moves down his back, Richard can feel his cock hardening where it’s pressed against the bed. ‘Fucking _Christ_ …’

Jared lifts his head, and Richard’s skin instantly feels colder, hungry. ‘Do you like that?’

‘Don’t stop—no, do, actually,’ says Richard. ‘I’m about to lose my mind if I can’t touch you…’

Jared smiles in the dark. ‘What do you want to do to me?’

Richard rolls over beneath him, stroking Jared’s bare arms thoughtfully. ‘What would you do to me if I were a girl?’

‘Mm. I don’t kiss and tell.’

‘It’s not as though I need names. Hypothetical.’

‘Hypothetically, I’d do what I just did. And now…’ Jared bends over Richard’s chest, his mouth brushing over Richard’s nipple. ‘But that’s only really fun for girls, isn’t it?’

‘I beg to differ,’ Richard says, and sits up, pushing Jared back to kneel on the bed so that he can reach his chest. The rippled silk of Jared’s nipple is delicately rough on Richard’s tongue, and he sucks at it until he hears Jared draw a sharp breath. Richard’s pushing Jared’s trousers down over his hips, hands sliding hungrily over iliac crest and belly. Richard’s short, bitten nails skim down Jared’s back, and he leaves a constellation of hickeys over Jared’s chest and throat. South of the shirt collar. No one will see—but Richard will know. _Mine._

‘God, please…’ Jared murmurs, his thoughts rippling with shock and excitement, his hands running through Richard’s hair.

‘Tell me what you want.’ It’s not a request but a demand, as Richard moves between Jared’s legs, spitting on his palm before taking Jared’s cock in his hand.

‘I barely know.’

‘Mouth or hand?’

Jared’s pale, clear eyes are hazy with want, but they sharpen at that, fixing on Richard. ‘Your mouth,’ he whispers. 

Richard gives Jared’s cock a long lick from the base to the head, lingering over the glans, letting the head press and rub against the inside of his cheek. An involuntary, throaty sound of contentment. He’s cradling Jared’s balls in his palm, other hand stroking the base of the shaft. Jared’s hand comes to rest on the back of Richard’s head, but doesn’t push. Richard, half kneeling and half sprawled over the bed, raises his eyes to meet Jared’s gaze as he sucks, lashes flush with his browbone. 

‘There—there you are…’ Jared whispers, sweeping Richard’s hair back from his forehead; it’s damp at the roots. It’s as if he’s only had glimpses of his friend up until now, and finally they can see each other face to face. He’s breathless. ‘I can’t—I’m getting close—’

Richard draws back, running his tongue over Jared’s cock one last time, and then moves to stack a couple of pillows in the middle of the bed. ‘Let me show you,’ he murmurs, lying down on the pillows with his arse in the air. ‘We did this at school sometimes—it’s not as messy and it doesn’t hurt. The tub of brilliantine’s on the table there, see?’

‘Yes. What—’

‘Put it between my thighs.’

 _‘Oh.’_ Jared laughs in recognition, but bends to kiss the back of Richard’s freckled shoulder in apology. ‘I’m not laughing at you—one does that with girls sometimes too. If she doesn’t want to get in trouble.’

‘Then you don’t need instructions,’ says Richard, who’s reached down to play with his own cock. ‘Just fuck me.’

Jared smiles and takes the tub of brilliantine from the table, scooping out a bit of the oily stuff with his finger and rubbing it between Richard’s closed thighs. Richard’s arse is as pale as the rest of him, but with some elegant curve to it, and Jared can’t help but put his mouth there, leaving a plum-coloured hickey on the soft, creamy skin. 

‘You could’ve said something to me weeks ago,’ says Jared, his cock slipping into the tight, slick space between Richard’s thighs. ‘Do you know that? That I would have done anything you asked?’

Richard’s touching himself, lip between his teeth as Jared fucks his thighs. ‘I think so,’ he whispers, breathless. ‘I don’t know why.’

‘Because I’ve never known anyone like you. Because you wouldn’t let anything stop you. The only things you were really afraid of were things that could never have happened—the very idea that anyone would think you weren’t smart enough, it’s mad. Intoxicating.’ Jared’s rubbing and kneading Richard’s arse as he fucks, breathing hard, gleaming with sweat. ‘I’m so close, I’m coming—’

‘Come for me,’ says Richard, a command.

Jared’s muscles are knotted with sweet tension, locked in place, hands around Richard’s waist now to pull him in even tighter. And then Jared’s coming all over Richard’s thighs, the pillows, the candlewick bedspread.

‘Fuck, God, yes, look at you…’ Richard comes a minute later, by his own hand, his fair skin flushed all across his chest and the centre of his back.

They lie still for a minute or two, breathing hard, and Jared drops down to lie on the clean spot beside Richard. ‘Cold water,’ he says finally, swallowing. ‘A soft cloth.’

‘Is that the secret?’

‘Never fails me, as long I get to it quickly.’

‘All right. In a minute.’ Richard turns Jared’s face closer to kiss him. ‘You look so rumpled,’ he says, teasing. ‘All messed up, it’s so sensual…’

‘If you mean my hair’s a fright—’

‘It’s beautiful.’ Richard does go to the washstand for a damp cloth, catching the worst of what’s left on the bed. ‘You do the same for me, you know,’ he adds. His movements are still shaky. ‘I can’t be frightened of anything when you’re here.’

‘You don’t have to say it just because I did. I wanted you to know how I feel, that’s all.’

‘Well, I want to say it. It’s not a pleasantry, Jared. We’re the _same_ ,’ Richard whispers, gripping Jared’s shoulder. ‘We’re different, but the same.’

Jared wants to argue—they’re nothing alike, and Jared could never hope to be a thinker of Richard’s level—but something about it seems so true in the moment that he can’t say a word. ‘Stay with me for awhile, sleep with me,’ Jared whispers. ‘Set an alarm, I’ll go back to my room before morning. But stay.’

‘Of course. Of course.’

 

More letters come to Cambridge from Princeton; Richard finally accepts. There are mathematicians there doing incredible work, and he can’t stay in England forever. Jared can’t escape from Gavin Belson, who is odious but too important to reject. Richard and Jared part a few months later.

It’s only an affair, something for Jared to remember in odd moments— _was I ever so unconventional?_ A fevered memory. He doesn’t talk about it. When he marries an ambitious, intelligent girl in Georgetown, where he’s teaching economics, he tells her an edited truth: _I find men attractive too, just as attractive as women. I’ve been with men before. But that’s in the past. You’re the one I want._

Jared Dunn doesn’t say things that aren’t true.

It falls apart anyway—money, her family—and Jared loses another home that he thought was really his this time.

 

It’s years later when he sees Richard’s name again, in a letter from Dinesh Chugtai. Without the letter, Jared would have missed it all completely; the news itself was only fit for the back pages of papers that Jared doesn’t read. There’s a phone number.

Jared ruminates for a few hours before placing the long-distance call to Manchester, waiting for the time zones to align. 

The phone rings several times, but then—Richard’s voice, unchanged. ‘Hello?’

‘Richard. It’s Jared.’

‘Jared?’

‘Jared Dunn.’

‘No, I—I remember,’ says Richard. ‘I couldn’t...I couldn't forget.’

‘Dinesh wrote me. He told me…well, that you might be very happy to hear a friendly voice.’

Silence.

‘I hadn’t known about your troubles, Richard, I’m so sorry.’

‘Yes. Well. Bound to happen sooner or later, wasn’t it? Someone with my proclivities.’

‘It’s dreadful. I can hardly believe it. They won’t put you in prison, surely? Dinesh said you were at home.’

‘I am,’ Richard says. His voice isn’t unchanged after all; he sounds slower, weighed down. ‘At home in Manchester, not in St Leonard’s. Father said that men like us always shot themselves. But he and Mother still took my side against the police, although they said I was a silly ass to have involved them at all. You know the story?’

‘Dinesh said your house in Manchester was robbed. By rough trade. And you went to the police about it.’

‘That’s correct. If I’d known—I mean, I thought that these were antiquated laws. People told me that it was soon to be legalised anyway. But they had some special interest in me,’ Richard adds vaguely. ‘I did some work for the government during the war. But I can’t talk about it. Not even with you.’

Jared can easily imagine what wartime uses the British government might have had for someone with a mind like Richard’s. ‘Do you mean they thought you might be blackmailed?’

‘They said so. Even now, I see cars following me in the streets sometimes. I’m not mad,’ Richard adds. ‘I’m not imagining things. Quite the opposite. My head’s never felt so empty.’

‘I know. I know you’re not making things up.’ Jared began this conversation on his sofa, but now he’s slid down to sit on the floor instead, something that always reminds him of Richard. ‘What will happen to you?’

‘It’s already begun,’ Richard says dully. ‘Organo-therapy is what they call it. Stilboestrol, a synthetic form of estrogen. Female hormones.’

‘I—good God, Richard.’

‘They’ve bound me to stay on it for a year. It does work, as they say it does,’ says Richard, his voice still matter-of-fact. ‘Couldn’t get myself going if my life depended on it. They say that afterward…well, when you stop taking the stuff, your body goes back to normal. I certainly hope so.’

‘Me too.’ Jared swallows, then glances up at his calendar. He has the summer off. ‘Richard—listen. Do you have anyone there with you, in Manchester? I know that Dinesh is still down in London. What about the others?’

‘More or less where you left them. Bachman’s at Cambridge, Gilfoyle went to the University of Toronto for awhile but he might be back—I haven’t a clue. There were friends I made here, much against my custom—’ Richard gives a rusty laugh. ‘But a conviction for sexual indecency tends to clear the room.’

Jared isn’t impulsive. He plans his life as carefully as possible, because that feels safest. But he’s also a romantic. ‘Would you mind terribly if I came to see you this summer? Not even—if you don’t think you’re up to houseguests, that’s all right. I could sublet a flat of my own and come see you every day. You sound—it all sounds so lonely. And myself, I’ve…I’ve missed you. Very much.’

A long, long pause. ‘I can’t ask you to do that.’

‘But you’re not asking. I’m suggesting it, because I want to see you. That’s all right, isn’t it?’

‘Jared.’ Richard’s voice is thick. ‘There’s very little left to see. You shouldn’t…the problem is,’ he says, ‘is—I want to see you too. And it’s very selfish.’

‘Can’t you afford to be selfish, once in a while?’

‘Maybe you can.’ A smile in his voice, though he sounds no less overcome. ‘I’m at the end of my overdraft.’

‘Just say yes, Richard. I can tell you want to.’

And Jared can hear _no no no_ coming silently over the line, Richard who hates to feel like his emotions have become an emergency, but when the answer comes, it’s the right one: ‘All right, yeah.’

**Author's Note:**

> If you liked this, follow me on [tumblr](http://doctorcolubra.tumblr.com)!


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